106 Self-Help Books Distilled Into Twelve Strategies (Ep. 333)

Spencer Greenberg , mathematician, founder of Clearer Thinking , and co-author of The 12 Levers , joins us to talk about which self-help techniques hold up to evidence, why memory works like autocomplete, how exposure therapy dramatically reduced his lifelong social anxiety, why the law of attraction can backfire, how to design hiring interviews that predict performance, and what his team found replicating new studies from top psychology journals.

We've shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.

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Spencer Greenberg & Jim O'Shaughnessy

• Spencer Greenberg: Mathematician and entrepreneur, founder of ClearerThinking.org and Spark Wave, and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Clearer Thinking

• The 12 Levers: Spencer and Jeremy Stevenson's evidence-based toolkit for improving your life. The 12 Levers

• Clearer Thinking podcast: Spencer's interview show, where Jim has been a guest. Listen

• Transparent Replications: Spencer's project that randomly picks and re-runs new studies from top psychology journals. Transparent Replications

• Importance hacking: Spencer's essay on the problem his replications uncovered. Read the essay

• Jim O'Shaughnessy: Host of Infinite Loops, founder and CEO of O'Shaughnessy Ventures, and author of the New York Times bestseller What Works on Wall Street. Follow Jim on X

• Full transcripts: Transcripts and highlights from every Infinite Loops conversation. OSV newsletter

Books & Ideas Mentioned

• Reality tunnels: Robert Anton Wilson's idea that everyone perceives a different version of reality. Reality tunnel

• The Challenger memory study: Research showing how far people's memories of a major event drift over time. Flashbulb memory

• Spaced repetition: Spencer's recommended method for remembering what matters. Spaced repetition

• My Dinner with Andre: The film that shaped how Jim designed Infinite Loops. My Dinner with Andre

• Behavioral activation: The evidence-based depression technique Spencer describes. Behavioral activation

• Daniel Kahneman: Whose work for the Israeli military showed which interview methods actually predict performance. Daniel Kahneman

• Pre-mortem: The technique of imagining a plan has failed and working out why. Pre-mortem

• Replication crisis: The finding that many published psychology results don't hold up when re-run. Replication crisis

• John Sarno: The NYU physician whose work on the mind's role in chronic pain Jim credits with curing his frozen neck. John E. Sarno

• Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert: Jim's reference on how emotions show up physically in the body. Candace Pert

• Mirror box therapy: The phantom limb treatment Spencer uses to show the brain can reinterpret a pain signal. Mirror box

There's a wonderful study that illustrates this really well. After the space shuttle Challenger exploded, a teacher took advantage of it to do a psychology experiment where he asked his students to write down: what were you doing when you found out? What was going on for you right at that moment? And then years later, he had those same students write again, the same question: what were you doing when the space shuttle Challenger exploded? And then he had them compare. And it was absolutely shocking how different the two accounts were. And some students were like, "I don't believe this is what I wrote. I don't think that was actually me," because they just couldn't believe that their memory could be so wrong. It really can be disruptive, this idea that we don't remember things. It's so core to our identity, these facts about our history.

But I think that we just have to accept that is just the truth about the way memory works: that not only do we forget most things, but even when we remember things, we can distort them during the memory process. As you recall them, it's not like pulling a file from a drawer. It's kind of like generating a file from scanned information. One way to see that is if you try to remember your childhood home. You kind of picture it in your mind, and you'll probably be able to visualise it to some extent. But then if you ask a really specific question about it (what colour was the doorknob?) you'll probably have an answer. But most likely it's just going to be filled in in that moment, right?

It's generated, or some other little detail may not be in your memory, but your memory is just making a best guess. It's like autocomplete. Our brains are kind of autocompleting. But then the next time you recall that memory, now the doorknob might be remembered. And so now you're not autocompleting, you're remembering your previous autocomplete.

I've actually run a number of workshops on productive disagreement, where we bring people together in a room, and we have them fill out a long list of things that they agree to, they disagree to. So, you know, hot-button political topics, things like that. Then we match them with a stranger in the room. We have them overlay their sheets and find something where one of them strongly agrees and one strongly disagrees. And we're like, "Okay, you're going to talk about that, but you're going to do it in a special way. You're not just going to have a normal conversation." The first part of the conversation, person A is just going to ask open-ended questions of person B until person A can restate person B's thesis and ideas and beliefs so well that person B is like, "Yep, you got it. You understand me." And then they switch roles, and now the other one asks open-ended questions until they fully understand the other person's point of view. So now, after this first segment, they can both restate the other person's point of view to the other person's satisfaction.

And then, in the final phase, they work together as a team, collaboratively, to try to figure out the root of their disagreement. And they win together by figuring out the root, not by proving they're right or convincing the other person. So I call these productive disagreements. And I find them really fruitful in my own life. But also it's gone really well running these as workshops, because we're talking about sometimes really difficult topics, and yet people come away being like, "Oh wait, we actually disagreed less than I thought," or, "I don't agree with the other person, but I understand their point of view now." And so I find that a much more useful way to think about things, rather than a debate.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Well, welcome to Infinite Loops. Spencer, I have been a longtime fan of yours. As you know, I was on your podcast, where we talked about some of my challenges in trying to design a system that would help me make better choices on Wall Street. Your book, 12 Levers , is fabulous. We're going to talk about that later though, because you are on my buddy Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom currently, which I watched and thought was excellent. And we will get into the book, but I want to start in a different place. Close your eyes.

Spencer Greenberg
All right. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. But yeah, I'll close my eyes. I don't know where this is going.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Okay. This is something that I read that you advocated, and it's about perception with your eyes closed. Describe what I'm wearing.

Spencer Greenberg
So I think you're wearing a kind of grey button-down shirt, right?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That's correct. Anything else you can describe?

Spencer Greenberg
Nope, I literally have nothing. I didn't notice anything else.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Okay, open them up again. Are you a fan of Robert Anton Wilson?

Spencer Greenberg
No.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Okay. He has this idea that we all have different perceptual reality tunnels, he calls them. And he once did something similar. By the way, everyone listening and watching, this was Spencer's essay that I read, and that's why we did this exercise. But what he did was even more aggressive. He was giving a class, and it's down a long hall in a college. The first day, all his students came in and he told them, "I'm closing the door. Everyone take out a blank sheet of paper. Draw the hallway." And what he discovered is every drawing was different. Talk to me a little bit about what motivated you to bring that up, because it fascinates me that we all really do perceive things differently. And talk a little bit about how the exercise we just did can be helpful.

Spencer Greenberg
One thing I think is important to realise is that we're constantly in a state of forgetting. Almost everything that happens to us is just gone from memory. And what we're left with are these little samples that we then build stories out of, that are what we tell ourselves about our lives. That can really matter in relationships, and it can really matter in lots of different areas of life where, let's say, we have an interaction with a person and we leave the interaction feeling angry. But then the constant forgetting means that we actually forget most of what happened there. And now, from those little bits and pieces, we try to retell the story of why we're angry. And it probably involves the other person doing something wrong and us being right, naturally.

So there's a technique that I really like that I called the Inner Why technique. It's very simple, but it asks you to make a little game where you try to notice every time your emotion shifts, especially for the negative, over the next few days. And as soon as it shifts, you just ask, "Why? Why did it shift?" And what's neat about it is that, because you're trying to do it the moment your emotion shifts, typically there's only one thing that happened: one thing that was said, one thought that you had. And it's typically very easy to pinpoint why am I feeling that negative emotion. And it can increase your awareness, make you better at navigating difficult emotions, help you better understand what your role is in these situations.

But if you wait even just 20 minutes, you might just have the lingering feeling of anger or annoyance and not be able to identify where it came from, because of this constant forgetting.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And I also read, when I was reading your stuff, we have something like thousands of thoughts a day. And if at the end of the day you ask me, "Hey, Jim, how many thoughts do you have today?" I'd probably say either none or a couple. And that's that constant forgetting, right?

As a longtime journal keeper (so I've kept journals, not diaries, what I'm thinking, et cetera, for 40 years), one of the things that I was really blown away by was being called a liar in my own handwriting. I had a memory. It was about the first Gulf War, and I was at a cocktail party here in Manhattan, and everybody... This was when we did the second Gulf War, right? And everybody that was in the conversation had the same view: "Well, you know, I supported George Sr. going in because, after all, they invaded Kuwait and everything. But I do not support this particular incursion into Iraq." I said the same thing. I would have sworn in court that was what I believed. And then, I don't know, a couple days later, I was looking for something in my journals from that period. I found I did not support the first Gulf War. And I was really struck. So I started going back and I started seeing, wow, are we constantly overriding our memories?

Spencer Greenberg
There's a wonderful study that illustrates this really well. After the space shuttle Challenger exploded, a teacher took advantage of it to do a psychology experiment where he asked his students to write down: what were you doing when you found out? What was going on for you right at that moment? And then years later, he had those same students write again, the same question: what were you doing when the space shuttle Challenger exploded? And then he had them compare. And it was absolutely shocking how different the two accounts were. And some students were like, "I don't believe this is what I wrote. I don't think that was actually me," because they just couldn't believe that their memory could be so wrong. It really can be disruptive, this idea that we don't remember things. It's so core to our identity, these facts about our history.

But I think that we just have to accept that is just the truth about the way memory works: that not only do we forget most things, but even when we remember things, we can distort them during the memory process. As you recall them, it's not like pulling a file from a drawer. It's kind of like generating a file from scanned information. One way to see that is if you try to remember your childhood home. You kind of picture it in your mind, and you'll probably be able to visualise it to some extent. But then if you ask a really specific question about it (what colour was the doorknob?) you'll probably have an answer. But most likely it's just going to be filled in in that moment, right?

It's generated, or some other little detail may not be in your memory, but your memory is just making a best guess. It's like autocomplete. Our brains are kind of autocompleting. But then the next time you recall that memory, now the doorknob might be remembered. And so now you're not autocompleting, you're remembering your previous autocomplete.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And so we are overriding, right? And do we do that for coherence's sake? Do we do... What's your thesis on why that happens? Is it just the way that our brains are structured, or is there something more?

Spencer Greenberg
Well, I think it's somewhat debated, but my view is this is a clean evolutionary story, where brains are optimised for survival and not really other things, right? They're really just trying to get our genes to survive to the next generation, propagate. And if you think of it that way, we don't need to remember all these little details, right? We need to remember the big-picture stuff, the important stuff. And in fact, it might challenge our memory storage if we actually could remember everything. Maybe we run out of space. So the brain tries to be extremely efficient and just remember kind of the important things.

And then this autocomplete idea is really powerful, because it can often guess the right details of things you don't remember by using other memories, for example. And just, "Oh well, the doorknob probably looked like that, because that's what doorknobs look like."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And the thing that fascinates me is that can cause all sorts of trouble. And is there a technique? My technique tends to be I document, like, almost everything. When you leave, I'm going to do a series of notes in here about our conversation. And I found that's very, very helpful for me to do. Are there other strategies, or is it even advisable to want to be able to remember more of the actual things that transpired?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, I think that it's important to focus on what you actually want to remember and why, because a lot of these details of our lives, we don't actually need to remember them well. We need to remember certain important things. For example, when you read a nonfiction book, I think taking a little bit of time to take some notes is really powerful, because it can actually just help you get a lot more out of that book. If you don't take any notes at any point and never review them, there's a pretty good chance in three years someone says, "Well, what was that book about?" And you can remember one or two things. And so if it was a really valuable book, I think it is worth taking just a small amount of extra time. It can help consolidate those important memories.

But at the same time, I don't think we want to get lost and think, "Oh, I need to remember everything," and try to grip onto everything. It's just not realistic. So what is really key? What are the things that you really care about knowing? And then you can use simple techniques like make notes, but then review those notes at a certain periodicity. Spaced repetition can be a really powerful technique for this, where if you are trying to remember something, you don't need to review it every day. In fact, after you've learned it, you can review it at longer and longer intervals to keep it in memory. So maybe the first time you review is the next day, then the next week, then three weeks later, and so on. If you get it wrong, then you review it at faster intervals again. But if you get it right, you can keep making the intervals longer and longer.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, I also have kind of a weird memory, in that if I read something, my recall of it is pretty high. If I hear something or I see something, or, God forbid, I'm at a party, I don't remember, like, virtually any of it. Are those types of preferences, if you will, do they lead to different ways of thinking, do you think?

Spencer Greenberg
There's this fascinating phenomena where many people report having certain types of learning work better for them than other types. But the research on this is actually really kind of surprising, because there's essentially no good research that demonstrates that giving people different types of learning materials (like, some people are auditory learners, some are visual learners) and making the right learning material for their type actually produces better educational outcomes. So that's the strange thing: the research is out of sync with what many people just anecdotally experience. And that might be because the concept is fraught, but it also might just be because it's really hard to design those experiments, because you'd have to actually correctly identify someone's type. Then you'd have to have a bunch of versions of your educational materials that are well optimised for each type. Maybe that's just a really high bar. So in practice, there's actually very little known about how to kind of specialise information for people's learning type.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
One thing: when I was younger, I was into neuro-linguistic programming, and so auditory, kinaesthetic, visual. And I did find... and of course this is pre me documenting everything. I did find that if I listened closely, I could pretty much grok what style my conversant preferred. And so you don't say, "Does that ring a bell to you?" to somebody who's a visual thinker.

Spencer Greenberg
Right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
You want to say, "Can you see the big picture?" And I did find that by making just small adjustments to the way I was talking to the person, when I switched over to their preferred method, they became more engaged, they relaxed. It was very interesting to me. I wish I would have documented that more.

Spencer Greenberg
Well, that's a really interesting example of something that we actually talk about in our book, The 12 Levers , around how you can actually transform conversations with people by learning to pay more attention. Very often when people are in conversations, maybe they're 80% focused on the other person, but they're a little bit thinking about what they're going to do tomorrow. They're a little bit distracted by what's in the corner of the room, or thinking about, "Oh, I want to talk to that person next." And it can really, actually be transformational, really trying to give the other person your complete, interested attention and really sort of be fully there with them. And if you hear about people who met, like, Bill Clinton or the Dalai Lama, they'll often mention things like this. They felt like even this important person was suddenly fully there with them. And it really strikes a chord with people. And I think we can all learn to do that better.

And so I think the example you're giving is actually a great example of this, of what happens when you learn to pay more attention. You start noticing things you never noticed. I had an instance where I was at a holiday party, and this guy who talks to me at all the holiday parties comes up to me, and I never had a good conversation with him in my life. And I kind of have this internal groan when he comes and talks to me. So he comes back to me and I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to really try to give him my complete, full, interested attention, 100%." And I did it. And for the first time ever, I had a really good conversation with him. And I was like, "Wow, maybe this is a me problem. Maybe this guy's fine." And that really changed my thinking on this.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And then how did you incorporate that? How did you habituate that? Because, you know, there's a lot of great advice in your book, but I think you've got to habituate the behaviour if it's going to make any difference.

Spencer Greenberg
Right. Yeah. So one of the really useful ideas is trying to pick a trigger, right? So you have a trigger, and then you're going to say, "Okay, the next five times I see this trigger, I'm going to make sure to do this thing." And if you can stick with it five times, that will make the sixth more likely, and the seventh more likely, et cetera. So for me, the trigger is when a one-on-one conversation starts with someone. That's going to trigger, "Okay, now I'm going to try to really focus on this person, really try to pay attention." It's still something I'm working on. I could certainly still improve, but already I feel like it pays gains in my life, even if I don't do it perfectly.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And your mention of... I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Clinton after he was president, and I was blown away by the attention he paid to me. I felt, literally... It might have been a five-minute conversation, but I felt like he was a million-watt light bulb and all of that energy was just focused on me, given the way he asked questions, et cetera. And again, this is a five-minute conversation.

Spencer Greenberg
That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And so he clearly has mastered that. And then you add to it, he's like, "O'Shaughnessy. Galway, right?"

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And I just found that really interesting. I think that gives people a tremendous advantage, right? Because I find that a lot of people are really not listening. What they're doing is thinking about how they're going to respond. And that's why you get these people on TV shouting at each other, and, you know, "I did not..." And no real communication has taken place.

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah. It not only causes other people to like us more, but importantly, it often makes conversation more interesting for both people.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Totally.

Spencer Greenberg
Because by being really focused on what they're saying, you often notice nuances that you would completely miss. You notice directions you want to take the conversation. And, you know, my own podcast, Clearer Thinking , which you've been on... I don't know if you've observed this, but having done hundreds of interviews, I realised that when I was a younger interviewer, I would often miss important conversational branches that, by paying more attention, I actually now start to pick up on more. You just realise, "Oh, wait, there's a really interesting thread here. And we could have just blown right past it."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And when I was designing this podcast... I don't know if you've ever seen the movie My Dinner with Andre . It's a 1980, I think, movie. Anyway, it's just a conversation, literally. And it's riveting. It's literally riveting. And you feel like you're a fly on the wall in this conversation. But one of the things that happens between the two is they actually listen to each other, and then they disagree, they agree, et cetera. But they also go down tangents, right? It's like, when I started doing podcasting, I would say, "Yeah, we'll get to that later." Big mistake. If you see something, if you see an opening, take it then. And the conversation just becomes more interesting, but also just more authentic, because, you know, why are you going to remember something we covered now, 20 minutes from now? Why don't we cover it now?

What more can people do? I think that we have a situation where people literally... Maybe it's because our perception filters, our reality bubbles, tunnels, are different, so different from one another that, you know, same movie... As Scott Adams would say, "Same movie, two different screens," right? Do you think there are some techniques that people could study and then habituate that would make communication more fruitful?

Spencer Greenberg
I've actually run a number of workshops on productive disagreement, where we bring people together in a room, and we have them fill out a long list of things that they agree to, they disagree to. So, you know, hot-button political topics, things like that.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Sure.

Spencer Greenberg
Then we match them with a stranger in the room. We have them overlay their sheets and find something where one of them strongly agrees and one strongly disagrees. And we're like, "Okay, you're going to talk about that, but you're going to do it in a special way. You're not just going to have a normal conversation." The first part of the conversation, person A is just going to ask open-ended questions of person B until person A can restate person B's thesis and ideas and beliefs so well that person B is like, "Yep, you got it. You understand me." And then they switch roles, and now the other one asks open-ended questions until they fully understand the other person's point of view. So now, after this first segment, they can both restate the other person's point of view to the other person's satisfaction.

And then, in the final phase, they work together as a team, collaboratively, to try to figure out the root of their disagreement. And they win together by figuring out the root, not by proving they're right or convincing the other person. So I call these productive disagreements. And I find them really fruitful in my own life. But also it's gone really well running these as workshops, because we're talking about sometimes really difficult topics, and yet people come away being like, "Oh wait, we actually disagreed less than I thought," or, "I don't agree with the other person, but I understand their point of view now." And so I find that a much more useful way to think about things, rather than a debate.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Are you familiar with Nick Gruen's work? He's an Australian, and he advocates for the jury system. Because this is the result, right? They didn't intend it to be the result. But when you've got the one holdout, "Guilty as hell," and the other one, "No, did nothing wrong," they literally have to solve the problem, right? And so you get a much different outcome when you jury something, as opposed to the standard political stump speech: "This is why you're gonna love," fill in the blank, right? Data centres, or what have you. And at least the research of his that I'm familiar with, it seems to lead to much better outcomes.

One of the things that I started doing aggressively when large language models got better was to always steelman points of view that I disagree with. And you're right. I do them on everything, right? Really hot-button topics. And I don't think I've ever steelmanned an argument that I really vehemently disagree with where I haven't looked at it and said, "They do have a point." And so it's helped me to update my priors.

Spencer Greenberg
Right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Because I think that we all have this idea that we're right, right? And we're often not even close to right. We're often very wrong. And so I've always been fascinated by mental models, as you know. And one of the things that I wanted to ask was, do you think you would be more effective if you designed a system? On your podcast, we talked about why I became an algorithmic quant investor, right? It was basically to guard against the emotions that all investors face. And I just saw, by reading history: wow, when the emotions take over, watch out. Fear, greed, hope and ignorance are the four horsemen of the investment apocalypse, and only ignorance can be dealt with.

You do something fun with your parties. We're going to shift over there. I was absolutely fascinated. Just briefly... I'm going to let you describe it, but you have parties here in New York where you can never use the same format twice. I want to get to why that is. But the things you've covered, I think, are just so cool. Like, one party was people dealing with shame. Another was radical honesty. Another was kind of a fight club mentality, where you could choose which one you were going to do. First off, what inspired you to have parties like this? And, more importantly, what did you learn from the outcome of these parties?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah. So I run a group called Ergo, and we're a social experiments group. We throw social experiments. And as you said, we have a rule: we're never allowed to repeat the same format twice. The way it came about is, for a long time, it was just a regular kind of intellectual meetup. And we would have people come give talks, we would have group discussions, all the standard things. And honestly, I just started getting bored of it. I was just like, "I'm getting bored by my own events. How do we do better?" And also, in a world where you can go listen to the greatest podcasts or watch lectures on YouTube, it's like, well, why are you coming to an event just to sit and listen to someone speak in front of the room, right?

It didn't make that much sense to me as the world changed. So then I was like, "Okay, we want to try new formats." So I went on this research process, and I tried to figure out every format for bringing people together who don't know each other. And I made this giant list and analysed: well, what is each one good for? So then we started using some of those little more out-of-the-box formats. And then I was like, "Well, I want even more." And so finally I was like, "Okay, we're just going to make a group rule. We can never use the same format twice." And to be honest, it became a form of creativity for me. You know, some people like working with clay or painting, and for me, creating social experiments is just my creative hobby.

So I really enjoy it. And I think of it as this fascinating thing where you kind of drop a rock into the pond and all these ripples come out, and you don't know what it's going to be. So you bring people together and you have some change in social dynamics, and different things happen, and it can be extremely unpredictable. You don't necessarily know until you run the event what's going to happen. Sometimes it's quite shocking.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And not to give away any confidences or anything that might have happened, but what are a couple of examples where you were going into the party expecting one thing, and coming out of the party thinking, "Whoa"?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah. So one of the strangest is, we did an event we called sensory deprivation socialising. And so the first half of the event, when people arrived, before they even entered, we blindfolded them. They knew this was going to happen. So, you know, they weren't in shock. But so they didn't get to see anyone they were interacting with. And most of the people at my events typically don't know each other, because it's a large enough group that most of them have never met. So they're interacting with people they've never met, and they can't see them. They're trying to understand, "Okay, what are social norms when you can't see someone?" And, you know, it was kind of funny, because they would make these social faux pas without realising it. They'd be standing way too close to other people, or way too far away. People would get confused about what conversation they were part of and what others were a part of. Suddenly someone would start talking, and they're like, "I didn't know there was a person in this conversation." So that was kind of funny.

But where it got really strange is the second half, where we had people take the blindfolds off, and they could now see, but they weren't allowed to make any sounds whatsoever. So do you want to guess what happened? A bunch of strangers, they're going to be socialising for 45 minutes, but no sound. What do you think would happen?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I personally would think, depending on the group of strangers that you put together, that there would be maybe a Pareto distribution, with 20% having intense, really cool conversations with somebody that, if they could see them, they probably would not have had that conversation. And 80% awkward.

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah. So, well, in the second half, once we no longer allowed them to make any sound, the really strange thing happens. At first people were like, "Okay, I'm just going to try to communicate." So they would write things down, or, you know, try to get communication without sound. But that is basically just a bad form of talking. It's less effective, obviously. If you're trained in it, that's one thing, but they're not. So then the strangest thing started happening. People started dancing with each other, total strangers, even though there's no music. People started, with consent, exchanging massages. And then someone invented a little improv game, and people started copying it. And so by the end, everyone was playing these improv games and dancing.

And I was like, there is no way this would ever happen at a normal cocktail party, where this just suddenly erupts. Just by removing sound, we completely changed the social dynamic.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Is that one you wish you could repeat?

Spencer Greenberg
It would be interesting to try that in different formats, and kind of vary it in different ways and see what would happen.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
When I took your Ultimate Personality Test, I got all the same things that I always got. I always score off the charts on extraversion. I'm married to an introvert, and so this has caused all sorts of trouble, because I will literally go up to anyone and talk to them. And we were in Miami, and I saw a guy vaping. This is back when vaping was just starting. But he looked literally like a member of the Hells Angels. He had tats everywhere. He had the chains and everything. He was sitting... It was obviously the bouncer for this club. I saw him, and my wife is, "Don't you dare." So I wanted to know why somebody like him was vaping as opposed to smoking. And so I went over and struck up a conversation with him.

Had the best 45-minute conversation in a long time. Turns out, very thoughtful guy, really interesting life. We talked about a lot of different things. But then when we got to the vaping, I said, "So what gives?" And he goes, "My old lady, man." But I find that if you're willing to kind of go there, there's just so many fascinating lives in the world that, if you don't have that urge, you're going to miss out on. And I was fascinated by... When I was listening to you with Chris, you were talking about your own sort of social anxiety and how you cured that. How's that going?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, it's been a lifelong project, but it's phenomenally better than when I was younger. And for anyone listening who's interested, we have this personality test called the Ultimate Personality Test. It's free. It's on our website, clearerthinking.org, so you can check that out. That's what Jim was referring to. But yeah. So social anxiety I had since I was a child. It was always a problem for me. And then when I was in my early 20s, I was like, "Okay, I really need to do something about this." And it would typically get most triggered when I was in a social situation where I had to talk to a stranger, and my heart would suddenly start pounding in my chest, and I would feel like I was gonna die. Even though, of course, it's completely irrational. I was totally safe.

But on some level, my brain was predicting something really bad was going to happen. And I went to a therapist who was really good, really evidence-based, and he said, "Spencer, I can help you, but you're not going to like the strategy of how." And I was like, "Oh, what's the strategy?" He's like, "Okay, I'm going to give you homework. Every weekend, you're going to go to a bar alone, and you're going to introduce yourself to five strangers." This was absolutely terrifying to me. As an extrovert, you're probably like, "Yeah, no big deal, whatever." But it was truly terrifying to me. And so we started small. We made a fear hierarchy of things that were a little bit frightening, a little more frightening, et cetera. And the first level was just go up to people, ask them what time it was.

And even that would make me really anxious. But I would practise that until it became easy, and then I moved my way up. The next one was go up to people, ask them what drink they're drinking. And I found that a little more difficult than asking the time, et cetera. And it culminated all the way in the final... The final exam was, I went up to men at bars in Manhattan and said, "Excuse me, would you give me a hug?" And, you know, I was like, "I'm going to die. They're going to punch me in the face." But yeah, nobody ever attacked me. At worst, they just said no, or they laughed, and some of them gave me hugs. And it had a dramatic effect on my social anxiety.

I think I'll always be a little bit socially anxious, but it's so tremendously reduced that there are times now where I'm like, "I think I'm the least anxious person here in this whole room." In situations that used to be terrifying, I'm just totally fine.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And that's kind of like exposure therapy, right? You just expose them a little bit more and more. Are there other therapies that you came across in writing the book that would be equally as effective?

Spencer Greenberg
Yes. It's fascinating, because there's so many self-improvement techniques out there, but most of them have not been studied to a tremendous degree. But exposure therapy is one. There's a ton of really good research showing that it can dramatically improve people's anxiety. And there's some nuances in how to do it exactly. And in the 12 Levers book, we talk about the right way to do it, and kind of traps people fall into. But there are other methods that also have really robust evidence. And one of them is for depression. It's known as behavioural activation. It turns out that even though depressed people often have a lot of negative thinking (they might feel hopeless about the future, they might hate themselves, things like that), they also started reducing their pleasurable activities.

So they tend to start doing less and less of the things they really enjoy. And partly this is because maybe they just don't feel like doing it, or they lack motivation, but also partly they often predict that they're not going to enjoy those things. They say, "Oh yeah, I know I normally like that, but I'm just not in the mood. I'm not going to have fun." And so there's a really simple but quite effective technique, which is you get people to run behavioural experiments on themselves. And you say, "Okay, let's make a list of the things that normally bring you the most joy and meaning in your life when you're not depressed. Let's have you predict how you're going to feel doing them, and then you're going to actually go do them and compare it to your prediction."

And very often, depressed people find that they enjoy it more than they thought. They don't necessarily enjoy it as much as someone who's not depressed, but they tend to enjoy it more than they thought, and it actually can help break them out of these depression spirals. And there's been a lot of really good research on this technique, and it actually works quite well.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And exercise is another one, right? If you're depressed, exercising, like taking long walks, can also be helpful.

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, exercise is just one... It's, you know, the closest we have to, like, the miracle drug, which is just... It helps with so many things, including mental health. Yeah. So that's always a great place to start. Of course, if people are depressed, they often struggle to do things like exercise. And I think there's way too much emphasis put on the optimal form of exercise. Yes, if you're a super athlete and you're already exercising, you know, five times a week, sure, think about optimising. But for most people, I think you want to go the opposite way. I ask people, what is the type of exercise you most enjoy in the world, you find the most fun, where you actually look forward to it? It doesn't feel like it takes willpower. If anything, it should be the opposite. It should feel like a good guilty pleasure to go do it. Do that first, right? And so for me, I love mixed martial arts. So, you know, if I'm doing mixed martial arts, I enjoy that. If I have to go run, oh my gosh, that's going to be a lot harder.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that seems so in line with common sense, right? And by the way, I'm glad you did it so I didn't have to. You read 106 books, I think, with many therapies also. And I think the final number that you came out with was 500 various takes on how to improve, et cetera. As you know, I love data. And how many of them just turned out to be without any empirical support at all, that people were actually buying into?

Spencer Greenberg
So I want to distinguish between self-improvement techniques that have never been studied, so we just don't know, and ones where we have actual evidence that they're harmful, because those are different things. You could have a technique that actually could be quite good, but it's never been really empirically tested. So there's a distinction there. I think that there really are some popular ideas in self-improvement that are pernicious, that they actually make people's lives worse. And often the way that they operate is that they give an initial boost, so you might think, "Oh, this is really helpful to me," but they might cause harm in the long term. One of the ones I would point to there is the law of attraction. So, this very popular idea that thoughts become things.

And so the idea is not, if you believe in something enough, then you'll go take action to cause it to happen. That's specifically not what they're claiming. They're claiming that believing something enough causes it to happen without you having to take any action. So for anyone who believes this, I really want you to, every morning, believe as hard as you can that there's a bowling ball in your freezer, and just do it every morning until you no longer believe this works. But it's a really pernicious idea, because it basically tells you, if you believe hard enough, it will happen. You don't actually have to do anything. Which can be really exciting at first, when you start believing it, and can also get you to think positively at first, because you're focused on all the things you want, not what you don't want.

So you get this initial kick. But then the problem is, that's just not the way the universe works. And if bad things happen to you, it can make you easily blame yourself, because, "Oh wait, you got sexually assaulted. Well, what kind of thoughts were you having?" And, like, oh my God, that's actually a horrendous philosophy.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I do think the kernel of truth in the law of attraction is what you covered. You gotta take action.

Spencer Greenberg
Yes.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I make fun... I have a friend who is always saying, "Well, you can do this, Jim," blah. And I tell him, "Well, manifest it for me." And he goes, "No, I'm far too lazy to take any action to do that." But why, then, does that book... Is it just because, kind of, the something-for-nothing... People want the easy path? I wrote... When threads were still a big thing on Twitter, I got really triggered when I was reading one of these: "These are the 10 rules of success. These entrepreneurs do this." And I'm immediately like, "Biased sample. Self-selected sample. Everything you're saying here maybe worked for that one guy or woman, and probably didn't."

And maybe they're not articulating... Anyway, I went on this whole rant about, listen, if you just think you can dream things into existence, or that you're going to succeed by following this list, I got bad news for you. That's probably not going to happen. What other techniques... But what drives me crazy, right, is those very techniques are the ones that sell 10 million copies of the book, get a movie made, all of that. Is it just the desire for, "Wow, I don't have to make an effort, and look, everything's gonna be mine"?

Spencer Greenberg
There's this generic self-improvement pitch you hear a lot, which is, "Look, I used to be just like you. The problems you have... But look at me now. I'm so spectacular. And because I was like you, and I overcame it, I can teach you the trick to doing it. And by the way, the trick is easy and simple and fast, and it works for everyone all the time." And of course, none of that's really true, right? Even the best techniques in the world often won't work for everyone, right? Maybe they'll work for a third of people, the best techniques in the world. And then there's also shit that doesn't work for anybody. So, yeah. But that's a really appealing pitch. And sometimes they use other things to make it sound more exciting, like they'll shroud it in mystery.

You know, a lot of the law of attraction stuff is like, "Ben Franklin was actually using this, and that's what made him so successful. We'll teach you the secret of Ben Franklin," or whatever it is.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
So isn't there also some kind of transference? You wrote a piece, or did a podcast on it, I can't remember which. I saw the transcript, so I don't know if you wrote it as an essay or not. But where people immediately associate celebrities and/or people well known in their industry, and if they hear them say, "I solved all of my problems by," you know, fill in the blank, do people attach more importance to that because of who is saying it?

Spencer Greenberg
People often describe irrationality as though it was about the individual, because we have all these cognitive biases in our brains. You know, we tend to jump to conclusions, we tend to ignore certain types of evidence, have confirmation bias, et cetera. And that's all true. But I think actually a significant part of irrationality is social. We as humans, when we trust someone and they tell us a thing, we assume that it's true by default. Maybe later we'll get some evidence that causes us to argue against it. But if they're a person we trust, that we consider an authority, or someone who's trying to work in our interest, then we absorb the information. And this can obviously be really useful, depending on who you surround yourself with.

But it also means that people often adopt beliefs without ever thinking about them, merely because they come from their trusted authorities. And I think that this leads, actually, to a tremendous amount of misinformation being spread. And then those people spread it to others, not trying to harm anyone, but just because they believed it themselves. And so it's so important that you vet your authorities, right? And it's interesting to think about: well, how do you know who's a legitimate authority? Who's a trustworthy authority? And there are kind of certain signs that you can look for. One is, does the person explain why they believe the thing? And if they do, then you can go just check it. You don't have to do it every time, but check at least a few times. "Oh, they said that they believe it because of XYZ. Let's go check that. That's true."

Have they ever changed their mind about something, right? That's always a really good sign. Like, "Oh wait, this person said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I got that thing wrong. I said this. It's actually this.'" That should update your view. This is a more credible authority.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Okay. So one of the things that at OSV I encourage is original mistakes. I sort of think mistakes are portals of discovery, if handled the right way. Obviously I don't want people making the same mistake, but original, novel mistakes can add a lot if you pursue them in the correct way.

How would you... Let's say I sent you a brilliant young founder, right? And she really talks the talk. She's going to talk to you about Bayesian updating, and she's going to talk to you about base rates, and she's going to talk to you about all of the well-known biases, how she combats confirmation bias, et cetera. How would you disentangle her wonderful way with words to find out... Because I think there's a big difference between being very well spoken and knowing a lot, and decision-making under adverse circumstances, right?

And so if this person were going to be working for me, this is the one I'm interested in, right? How would you go about... What kind of questions would you ask her to grok, "Yeah, she read it all and she memorised it all, but I don't think she's really putting it to the kind of use that I want her to"?

Spencer Greenberg
That would be quite the pitch. For one thing, I think knowledge of these kinds of biases can be helpful, but it's very far from actually solving the issue. You can know everything about the sunk cost fallacy and still fall for the sunk cost fallacy. In fact, almost everyone does, even if they know that. Or you can do all the anchoring and still get anchored in a negotiation, because knowledge is not enough. So what else do you need besides knowledge? Well, you need to actually think of the right thing at the right moment, right? So let's say you're in a negotiation and they throw out the first price. Just theoretically knowing about anchoring doesn't help. But if you can think about anchoring right at that moment, you say, "Anchoring. I know it's an issue." But even that's not enough. You need one more thing.

You need to know what to do, right? So even if you think of the bias at the right time, you have to know what to do to correct it. Because if you're like, "Oh, anchoring. Okay, cool. Now what do I do?" Well, you could be like, "Oh, I can re-anchor. So I'm going to create a new anchor to re-anchor this conversation," right?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.

Spencer Greenberg
So it's knowing what it is, thinking of it at the right moment, and then knowing what to do about it. So that's what I would try to evaluate in this hypothetical person. I would try to ask questions to understand situations they've been in when theoretical knowledge actually got pulled up into their memory. And then, what did they actually do with that knowledge to get a better outcome?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And how many people do you think fail at that task? So when I was still at Bear Stearns, they asked me to interview a bunch of intern candidates, and they only asked me to do it once. And you're going to hear why. I didn't do any of the "Where do you see yourself in five years?", any of that. With some, I was a little obnoxious. For example, to a person getting a master's degree in math, I briefly chatted about why math was important on Wall Street, et cetera. And then I looked at them and I said, "Yeah, by the way, what's 17 and a half percent of 72?" They fled the interview. And so that was maybe a little unkind of me. But the person I wanted to...

I ended up recommending one candidate, and he was the guy who... When I asked all candidates this, by the way, I would say, "Okay, so the S&P 500 is a capitalisation-weighted index that reinvests dividends. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price-weighted index that does not reinvest dividends. Both started in the late 1920s." Well, it's actually a proxy for the S&P, but the S&P, 90 or 75. "What do you think the Dow would be at today if it reinvested dividends?" And I didn't expect anyone to get the right answer, and the candidate I asked didn't get the right answer. What I wanted to see was how he was going to go about solving this.

And so, literally, his response was, "May I have a calculator? May I have some clean sheets of paper? And can I ask you questions?" And I'm like, "Yes, and yes." And then, literally, for about 25 minutes he just worked it out. "What was the average dividend yield on the Dow between 1926 and..." I think this was in, you know, 2003. Told him, and he came very close. So can you see interviews going that way, as opposed to the... Because I have a somewhat... And maybe it's wrong, I haven't tested it, but I think that traditional interview questions actually subtract value, because you're literally getting no information.

Spencer Greenberg
Right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Like, what kind of answer are you going to give to "Where do you see yourself in five years?" And "What's your biggest flaw?" "I just care too much," or, "I just work too hard." Do you think that there are other interview techniques that get much better results in terms of, yeah, that signal that this person might be someone we might want to consider?

Spencer Greenberg
The great, late Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman did some really fascinating research on this. He did work for the Israeli military, and they were looking at what actually predicts people being good in the military. And there were a lot of questions they would ask that, when he went and studied it, he found it doesn't really have much predictive power. What it does do is convince the interviewer that they know who's a good candidate. So a lot of the questions asked make the interviewer feel confident, but they don't actually predict the thing that we care about. And what he discovered is that what you really want to do is think about all the traits you care about. You want to design questions that are specifically trying to measure those traits, which it sounds like you were doing implicitly.

You're trying to... "What am I really trying to tell the person's good at?" And then you're designing questions to try to get at those things. You want to standardise them, because what happens is, if you create a lot of var... if different people get different questions, you're rejecting variance in your interview process.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Exactly.

Spencer Greenberg
So you want to standardise them, and then you want to evaluate the person on each of those individual questions designed to get at different traits. And if you do, that actually has much more predictive power. So a lot of interviews are actually not very good at predicting who's going to be good at the job, but they can be made better, and there's now enough knowledge to say how to design them more effectively.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And I'm assuming there are a lot of empirical tests that kind of point that way, right?

Spencer Greenberg
Yes, there's a lot of research on what makes someone good for a job. And it will be dependent on jobs, to some extent. For example, if it's a salesperson, a trait like extraversion is probably helpful. You know, if it's a computer programmer, extraversion probably doesn't help at all. So you do have to think about, well, what are you hiring for?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Right.

Spencer Greenberg
But across a wide range of different types of jobs, the personality trait of conscientiousness tends to be a good predictor of performance. These structured interviews, like I described, can help predict. One of the best predictors are work sample tests, where you give people real work to do that's as close as possible to the actual job, have them do it and then grade it. Makes a lot of sense. It's kind of a dumb idea, in a way: have them do the thing. But it actually is one of the best predictors. And the key there is trying to find a microcosm of the real job, because you obviously can't embed them in the actual job. But can you pull out a little piece of the job that reflects it, and have them do that as part of the interview process?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And what role do stereotypes, which we all keep in our minds whether we realise it or not, other priors ("I knew a person just like this, and he turned out to be a real bad egg")... Is there any way to disambiguate all of the internal biases you as the interviewer might have, and at least be aware or try to counteract them?

Spencer Greenberg
There are some really handy techniques. For example, one that I like to use is you blind yourself to the person's name when you're evaluating résumés and things like that. Just take the name off. Why should you see the name? The name is not going to help you figure out who is a better candidate. But the problem with the name is it will give you a picture in your mind of who you're dealing with. And sometimes you can actually find incredible candidates. If you blind yourself to certain information that is not actually predictive, you can actually find better candidates that others may miss because of their stereotypes and biases, right? So I think that's one.

I think another is just to understand that, while stereotypes sometimes have some correlation with reality, they tend to be... Well, first of all, they're unjust, because we're lumping people in a box. But also, we tend to way overestimate how strong they are. So take an example of men versus women. We did a bunch of research looking at, in the US, what are the biggest personality differences between men and women, and how big are they? And the fascinating thing is, we did find, on average, some differences in self-reported personality between men and women. We also tested people on whether they could predict them. Do they know which ones men are higher on and women are higher on? Yes, they're pretty accurate. I think about 80% of the time they were able to predict whether men or women were higher, right?

But people thought the effects were so much bigger than they are. The reality is that men and women are these... If you think about it as, like, bell curves, they're heavily overlapped. Very, very heavily overlapped. But people think that they're like separated distributions. And that leads to all kinds of weird biases and problems when people are evaluating, let's say, women candidates for a job that's not stereotypically done by women, or male candidates for a job that, you know, is not stereotypically done by men.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And okay, so we know about the problem. What effective ways are there to combat that in an organisation like mine?

Spencer Greenberg
Right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Like, I love the blind. I was involved with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and for a while they did blind auditions. The musician would play behind the screen. And I thought that the candidates selected ended up being significantly better because of that one intervention. What other types of things would you recommend if we were hiring you as a consultant, right? To get people to run the process in a more advantageous... Because, after all, we're looking for predictions, right? Is this person going to be good at the job, yes or no? What other types of things would you advocate that we consider?

Spencer Greenberg
Another technique I find useful is grading parts of a person's application process in the context of other applicants. So, you know, you imagine a spreadsheet where each row is a candidate, and each column is something they did, like something they submitted, or a work trial task, or whatever. You could grade by row. You go across that one person and look at everything they did. And that's the natural way people want to do it. But actually, it's often better to grade by column. You say, "Okay, I'm going to compare everyone's work sample tests side by side and evaluate each of those," so that instead of focusing on the person who submitted it, you're focusing on just: well, how well did they do at this particular task, relative to the other candidates?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That's a really good idea. Given all the research you've done for the book and everything... So we give fellowships at OSV. They're non-equity. And if you're a builder, and if you're a researcher, obviously you get funds to do the research. Is there any particular study that you would like... "Oh, finally it's going to get funded"? And let's say it's for a six-month to 12-month... What kind of study would you design if the funding was appropriate?

Spencer Greenberg
So we run a lot of research studies. Actually, right now we're running one I'm really excited about on self-improvement, where it's like a horse race. We're actually pitting 20 different self-improvement techniques against each other.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Oh, great.

Spencer Greenberg
And so each participant is going to be randomised to get four of the self-improvement techniques to do for a month, and they're going to do them. It will just take, like, 12 minutes every morning. And then we're going to track, and we're going to see what kind of outcomes on, you know, anxiety, depression, happiness, productivity, all these kinds of things. Because these kinds of studies, where you actually say, "Well, how well do different things work against each other?", controlled for who the people are, controlled for the amount of time they're doing, they're very rarely done, but they're some of the most pragmatic. They can actually tell us what works in practice. What should you actually advise people to do?

So I'm really excited about that kind of study. And one study in that genre that, as far as I know, has never been done, that I would love to see done, is a study testing different goal-setting approaches. Because setting effective goals and useful goals is really valuable. But I've never seen a study that says, "Okay, let's try different ways of helping people to set goals, and then we'll track people for three months or six months or whatever, and look at how well did they achieve them, but also how satisfied are they with what they achieved," and actually see what's really effective for goal setting.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
It reminds me of what I think is an apocryphal study. They always claim that it was done at Yale or Princeton or Harvard.

Spencer Greenberg
Right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
It's always one of the Ivies. And you'll see them on the listicles on social media. And they say, "We tracked the class of..." and it's a class from, you know, 40 years ago. And the one I'm most familiar with is, 2% of them were at the top of their profession, happily... I mean, you know, they really laid it on. And what was the only difference between those people and everyone else in the class? They all had written goals. And so I first discovered that, I think, when I was a teenager, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to do written goals," which I did, and it worked out actually pretty well. But that isn't... You're the expert. That isn't a real study, is it?

Spencer Greenberg
I've never heard of that study. It sounds too good to be true. You don't usually see those kinds of effect sizes, where just the 2% who succeeded all did the same thing.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
All of my alarm bells were going off later, when I revisited what I wrote about it when I was younger.

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, I don't think that's true. However, I do think it is really useful, setting goals. And I think a really common mistake people make is that they don't understand what we call, in our book, their guiding foundations. And if you don't understand your guiding foundations, it's hard to set goals that actually get you to where you want to go. So you'll see a lot of young people set a goal that's fairly arbitrary, like, "I want to be a lawyer." Well, why do you want to be a lawyer? "Well, because my parents seem to think it's a good path for me," or whatever. They don't necessarily have a well-articulated view on why this is actually important to them, based on what they fundamentally care about.

And so in The 12 Levers , we spend some of the early time in the book helping people figure out what are the things that are most fundamentally important to them. And then you can build your goals on those guiding foundations, to help make sure they're moving you towards what you want. It's really shocking how often someone will spend a decade pursuing a goal, only to get it and be like, "Oh, I'm not actually happy. Why did I do this?" That is a common human experience, and it's really disturbing.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I was lucky. My grandfather was a very successful entrepreneur, and I was the youngest grandchild, the martini baby. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for having those martinis. But he was the only grandparent I knew. My others had died before I was born. And so I got to spend a lot of time with him, and he taught me this thing that he called premeditating. And I use it to this very day. I used it when I did the goals, when I was reading that bullshit study. And what he wanted me to do... And I learned it's incredibly helpful, and I'll use your "I want to be a lawyer." What you do is you set, "I want to be a lawyer."

And then you go down one side of the list, and you say all of the good things that I anticipate will happen if I am a lawyer, if I get to be a lawyer. And then you also have another column of all of the bad things that might happen. And you gotta try to get imaginative. But then he also has you do: you don't get to be... You end up not graduating law school. What are all the good things that might happen because you didn't graduate law school, versus all of the... And I found that it unlocks all sorts of things that you don't even know you're thinking about. And so it helps to calibrate so much better, because you're also, you know, learning through via negativa, right?

I have found most of the really beneficial stuff that I surfaced when I do this comes on that side: "I didn't get to be a lawyer, but..." right? What do you think of that kind of idea?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, it sounds like a really useful technique, and it reminds me of the premortem technique, where you basically... You're about to undertake something, you set a goal, you're like, "I'm going to go do my PhD," or whatever it is. And then you think about, "Okay, suppose that this thing fails, or it doesn't go the way I want and I'm unhappy with the result. Let's just suppose that's going to happen. What do I predict the reason will be?" And you kind of write down the different reasons. "Well, maybe it's because once I get to graduate school, I won't get along with my advisor." Or maybe it's like, "I try to get into PhD programmes and can't get into them," or whatever.

You make a list of these kind of predicted ways it's going to fail, and then you can ask the question, "Okay, what can I do now to help plan in advance to prevent this bad fate?"

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And is part of that because you're just activating your reticular activating system? And suddenly, you know, it's like when you buy a new car. Whereas before you'd never seen any Volkswagen Beetles, right after you buy one, all of a sudden all you see are Volkswagens. It has to do, I think, with attention. You could correct me if I'm wrong about that. But the other thing that I wanted your view on is... So in my prior life as an asset manager, we were quantitative, algorithmic factor investors. And one of the things that I continually observed, and tried to guard against as much as I could when I was doing the tests, is what I call honest-minded data mining. In other words, they are not intentionally trying to skew or p-hack, but they end up doing that completely unconsciously.

Are there any methods... I mean, after all, you've just put a bunch of systems through the wringer. Are there any ways where you can say, "I think that the research here might need a redo"?

Spencer Greenberg
This ties in a lot to the so-called replication crisis in social science, where, for those who are not familiar, about 20 years ago, many studies were run that, when researchers then tried to redo them (say, "Okay, let me redo the study from scratch"), they didn't get the same result. And my best estimate is something like 40% of studies from around that time period don't replicate. So you don't get the same result if you redo the study. And I think that's way too much. You know, I think if it was 5%, we'd say, "Okay, yeah, there's always going to be some of that. That's expected." But 40% is a really high rate, and it makes it hard to build on science if 40% of the stuff is junk. How do you build your castle on that kind of foundation? It's really hard.

Thankfully, there have been a bunch of efforts to try to improve it. I think, actually, we still need a lot more work to make it better. But we do see progress, where p-hacking, where people do these kind of fishy statistical methods to get a result that's publishable... I think now the norm has shifted, where people view it as more bad, reviewers are more aware of it, people get punished socially more for doing it, and people are doing larger studies to combat it. And so we do see a lot of improvements, where people are really trying to do better research. And I think that there's progress, but still there's a lot more room for progress.

We have a project we call Transparent Replications, where, when new papers come out in the very top psychology journals today, we use a random number generator to pick a study from one of those papers, and then we go redo it from scratch. And so, unlike the project that was looking at the old research and saying, "Well, how was it?", we're now looking at the research today, the best research coming out of the top journals. And remarkably, what we're seeing, our initial signal, is that we're seeing less of that kind of p-hacking that gets a statistically significant result that's actually a false positive. And we're seeing more of another issue that is not really on people's radars. And it didn't actually have a name. We had to actually coin a name for it. We call it importance hacking. So it's analogous to p-hacking.

And the way it works is, if you think about, to publish in a top science journal, everyone, what they want to do is come up with something novel or interesting and important. That's what everyone's trying to do, but it's really hard, right? So some people use an easier method. So what are the other methods? Well, one, you could commit fraud, and thankfully few people are willing to do that. Obviously more do it than we would want, but few people are willing to do that. So that's one thing they could do. Another thing they could do is p-hack, so they get a false positive that looks real. And that's what a lot of people were doing, unfortunately, knowingly or unknowingly, you know, 20 years ago. But there's another method to get in a top journal, and that's importance hacking.

This new idea, which is, they could manipulate the meaning of the result, not necessarily consciously (they might be doing it subconsciously), but basically the reviewers reviewing it think it means one thing, but it actually means another thing. So if you were to redo the paper, you'd get the same result, but it doesn't mean what you think. And because of that, it's actually much less interesting, much less important, and would not have been published had they not shifted the meaning of the result. And so we're actually seeing quite a bit of that meaning shifting.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That's fascinating, and I think a really smart measurement to look at. What about the studies, right? So right now, I think large language models have advanced to a stage where they can do a lot of analysis without a lot of hallucination, right? I was reading a thing on my way in today where somebody was saying, "Here's what it would cost for large language models to review every scientific paper ever published and look for all the things we've been discussing." If a large language model did that with minimum hallucination, obviously guided by a human researcher, what do you think the results would be?

Spencer Greenberg
It's interesting, because science is really one of the most powerful things humanity has ever invented.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Totally agree.

Spencer Greenberg
We can discover incredible things. We can make lasers and satellites and computer chips. It's wild. At the same time, there's a lot of flaws in science. And so my view is, we shouldn't pretend that science doesn't have those flaws. But of course, there's always a danger of getting the sort of anti-science crowd riled up and being like, "Yeah, science sucks." It's like, no, science is incredible.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Right.

Spencer Greenberg
It's just that we're flawed humans trying to do... We're trying to do this incredible thing, and humans don't always live up to the incredibleness of what we're doing, right? We humans have flaws, and we bring them into the work. You know, there's p-hacking, there's importance hacking, there's political bias sometimes in science. So there's all of these things. So I think if you had a really reliable way of checking every scientific paper, I think you would find an absolutely massive number of errors, and yet still a bunch of areas where science still makes progress. They still are able to build. And it's sort of like, if there's too many errors, then maybe that subfield of science won't be able to prosper.

My personal life's mission, what I'm trying to do in my life, is try to make psychology a more robust science, to help it be more of a science any way I can, and to then help use that science to improve the world. That's what I want to do. I think psychology has tremendous potential, and I think it hasn't really fully lived up to that. There's some really great work in psychology, but I think there could be way more, with improved methods, better technology, better prioritisation around what topics are studied. So yeah, I'm really stoked about science, even though I see it as very flawed.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And we share that view entirely. I tried to write the book I'm best known for, What Works on Wall Street , following the scientific method. In other words, I disclosed everything I did, because I wanted people to be able to replicate. And a few people did, and it did replicate, most of it. But I'm also somewhat troubled by this kind of bifurcation. We're talking about the scientific method, right? Which is, you have a hypothesis, you run the tests and then you get your results, right? Feynman was famous for saying, "No matter how beautiful your theory, if the test does not indicate that it's correct, the test is right, your theory is wrong." And one of the things that troubles me is you have this kind of break-off branch, which I guess is called scientism, right? "You must believe the science."

Anyone who tells me the science is settled, immediately I think you don't really understand the scientific method, because it's never really settled. Yeah, of course, some of the best laws, you can continue to test, and you're going to continue to replicate and get the... But what do you think? How does one combat that? Because, as you say, the anti-science crowd is the crowd that terrifies me, right? Because it is responsible for virtually our entire modern life, right? When we discovered the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, et cetera. How would you go about dissuading someone, maybe just a friend who doesn't have advanced degrees, et cetera? What would be your pitch to be like, "Yeah, no, no. Science is not always right. In fact, it builds in this method to prove that it's not always right"? Any other tips for talking to people like that?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, I share that frustration, because, yes, on the one hand, the science deniers, they're causing lots of problems in society by ignoring what's actually true. But then the scientists, rah-rah science folks, that are like, "No, no, science is right about everything." Well, first of all, I would just point them to my field, psychology, and be like, "Okay, you do understand that the psychologists themselves are saying that they did decades of work that is not that reliable?"

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Right.

Spencer Greenberg
Listen to them. They're not full of shit. They're talking about their own field, and they pay the big price to accept that, right? So yes, we have to admit that science can go off the rails. It's a human process. It's fascinating, because there's certain scientific questions which almost certainly will never be overturned, right? You know, it's answered to a degree of certainty. It's very unlikely. However, there can be subtlety around it that could get overturned. Like with quantum mechanics: certain aspects of quantum mechanics, we've just proven them. So, not myself, I'm not a physicist, but they've been proven with such a level of rigour, you're like, there's no way that's ever going to get overturned. But our interpretation of it could completely change.

Much the same way where, when Newtonian mechanics was the king, people thought, "Oh, we live in a clockwork universe, and there's determinism." And then quantum mechanics, which agrees with Newtonian mechanics to a very high degree of accuracy in most situations, is like, "No, no, you've been completely misunderstanding everything." So certainly that could happen. We can't rule that out. Maybe a new theory of physics comes along and says, "We're looking at quantum theory the wrong way. Yeah, it's really accurate, but it's only an approximation of an even deeper theory." And the even deeper theory could have a different philosophy of what's real. So I think that we need to remember that could always get overturned.

But there's certain experiments that, yeah, they've been done so many times, with so many people and so many different varieties, there's no way they're going to get overturned at this point.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And do you distinguish between the hard sciences of quantum mechanics, physics, mathematics, et cetera, where you can at least sort of think, "Yeah, that research result is very well proven"? It reminds me of the old joke about the two bankers talking to one another, and the one says to the other, "Well, we know it works in practice. The problem is, will it work in theory?" But, like psychology... I love, by the way, that your work... because you are trying to bring rigour and empirical results and everything to it. But is there some sort of trait... I mean, what about things where the result of the experiment is always going to be indeterminate, right? How do you deal with that when you're doing psychological... Like that one person who just was in the study, but, like, a complete outlier. Do you normalise? Do you Winsorise? What do you do?

Spencer Greenberg
So in some ways, studying physics is harder than studying humans, right? You might need to build incredibly precise machines that measure things at, you know, a millionth of an inch precision or whatever, or giant particle colliders. But in other ways, studying physics is easier than studying humans. Every human on Earth who has ever lived has been different from every other human.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
That's right.

Spencer Greenberg
There is no... You know, every particle is the same of humanity, right? Culture changes, and things that we think are fundamental to humans, it's like, "Oh, whoops, that was actually just culture," and you could actually have a totally different culture. And separating out the factors... I don't know if you've heard of the phrase "the crud factor" in psychology. We ran a little analysis where we took thousands of different things that have been measured about humans, and we said, "Just pick two of them at random. What's the correlation?" And on average, the magnitude of correlation is about 0.1. So, in other words, almost any two random things you pick, they have some correlation, typically. Sure, it's not zero.

And that means that there's this incredible morass of everything is related to everything. And trying to pull apart that giant web and figure out what's really causing what, that's incredibly hard in this kind of messy world we live in. You know, take an example of childhood poverty, right? Well, childhood poverty could increase anxiety, because maybe people go through really stressful life events due to poverty. It could increase depression, because maybe people don't feel like their future has hope. Also future income, because starting in poverty makes it more difficult. So you start to see how everything kind of becomes connected to everything else, right? You take one variable, and it's like, oh, it's connected in this web. So it's really hard.

That being said, I'm optimistic. I think with better technology, better methodology and better prioritisation, I really think that we can make more progress in psychology. I don't think we're limited just by the difficulty of the field. I think there's much more we can do to do better.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And back to the book. If you were going to just say, "Hey, well, you're gonna..." Because I'm gonna ask you to do it. "Read my book because..." Yeah, give me your pitch.

Spencer Greenberg
Totally. Well, first of all, I just want to give a shout-out to my co-author, Jeremy Stevenson. He's a psychologist. He treats patients. He also has a PhD in psychology. So, giant shout-out to him. So I'll tell you why we set out to write this book, because I think it serves as a pitch for the book, which is, both Jeremy and I had tremendously positive experiences with self-improvement, where it really was life-changing. And also, we found it incredibly frustrating, because we read just on our own so many books, and many of them we'd be like, "Was that really worth reading?" Or, "Oh man, I waded through all the stories, and the only thing I got was these, like, two ideas." And so we both felt there's so much good stuff.

And also, it can be so frustrating, so confusing. We kept seeing the same ideas with different names, and not realising, "Oh, is that really the same thing or not?" So both of us were really inspired by this idea of, could we write a book where we try to find all the good stuff and put it in one book, and write the book that we wish we had just been able to read? But I don't think it's a replacement for the whole self-improvement literature. What it is, is a map that helps you figure out what are all the powerful levers that you can pull to improve your life. And then it also will tell you how to deep dive in any one of those levers. So we have tons of resources. If you're like, "Lever seven, that's awesome. That's really helping me," we give you really concrete steps you can take. But then we also say, "And if you want to go really deep, here's some great resources to go really deep on just that lever."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And we just mentioned that all humans are different, right? And do you think that there's any validity to the idea that one of the levers is gonna just perfectly fit me like a glove, whereas if you tried it, it was gonna be a disaster? Walk me through how somebody who reads the book... How do they figure... Because one of the things, again, confirmation bias, right? You're gonna see something that you already believe, and you're gonna say, "Oh, okay, I'm going to do more of that," when what they really need is more of the thing that isn't confirming their biases.

Spencer Greenberg
So I've run over 100 studies on human psychology, and people sometimes ask me, "What's your biggest takeaway? One thing, if you could point to it." And so I thought a bunch about that, and I realised my one biggest takeaway of all of it is that our human minds are incredibly different from each other. Much more different than we realise. Like, when we're sitting in front of another person, most people behave kind of similarly, and we don't fully recognise that the other person could be having a completely different experience. And so I think that's absolutely true in self-improvement as well. What works for one person won't be what works for other people. But some things are still really better than other things, in the sense that they tend to work for more people, for more problems.

And so that's partly why I think it's important to have 12 levers, not one lever. It's like, yeah, different things are going to help for different people. For me, some of the stuff around what we call approaching the monster (so, techniques around dealing with fear effectively), that was transformational for me, because I had a lot of social anxiety. You don't have social anxiety. You might find a different lever will be much more useful for you. Some people are overactive. They booked their whole schedule to absolutely the maximum capacity. And other people are underactive. They're just sitting around most of the day doing nothing. And those two people are going to need different things. So we want to give a bunch of powerful levers, but then you're going to have to do some work to figure out what the right lever is.

And actually, at the back of the book, we made a little decision tree to help map people to the right lever, to help them find what they need.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And what has been the feedback? Have people come to you and said, "I gave it a shot and I did it for X number of months, and my results were disastrous," and, you know, why is that? Or are people not over-communicating?

Spencer Greenberg
Well, we do make it clear you might need to try, you know, two or three levers to get the results. I really think that if you put in the effort, you pick a few that are relevant to you and you try them, I do think most people will really see benefits. But thankfully, we've been seeing in our reviews that we've been getting on Amazon and Goodreads, just review after review where people are saying, "Oh, this really helped me. This changed my life." Which is awesome and wonderful, but you also shouldn't take that too seriously, because you can also find people raving about how they drink their own piss and it improved their life. But it is very nice to hear. We love to hear those kinds of stories.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. I hope that's not one of the levers.

Spencer Greenberg
No, definitely not. The 13th lever.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
It's the 13th lever.

Spencer Greenberg
No, it's not one of the levers.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
But do not drink your own piss. Yeah, you use that as an example in well-known people giving advice, and then you went and said, "What was the advice?"

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, there's this thing that's so frustrating, and I think we're all kind of at least somewhat susceptible to it, where we see someone who seems credible, maybe it's an influencer we like or whatever, and they say, "I tried this thing and it changed my life, and it was amazing." And I think we feel, as humans, a temptation: "Oh, wow, that changed their life. I should try that thing." And so I really just wanted to combat that. So I was like, "I'm going to find the funniest examples of people being like, 'This revolutionised my life. Everyone needs to try this.'" And then you're like, wait, what did the person do? And there's literally an example of someone who drilled a hole in their head, and they're raving about how this is amazing and everyone needs to do it.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Do you think people really want to change?

Spencer Greenberg
I think that people want to change, but they're often afraid of giving up something, right? So let's suppose that you scroll on social media an hour every day after you get home, and you're like, "I don't want to do that. It's such a waste of time," right? But there's a reason you're doing it, right? It's not like you're doing it for no reason. So it's useful to think about what are you getting out of that, right? There probably is some benefit to you. Or even more serious stuff: maybe you haven't pursued a relationship, and it's been years and years, and you always thought, "I want to be married," but you never really meet anyone, right? Your lack of attempting to date is probably doing something for you. Maybe it's protecting yourself in some way, or avoiding rejection.

Whatever it is, very often our harmful behaviours do give us something that we value. And so it's useful to understand that, recognise that and say, "Yes, this is giving me something I value, but I can get even more of what I value by swapping it with something else." But it's worth acknowledging that we often have fear of change because there's something we're getting out of not changing.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And when I was reviewing your other podcasts and things you've written, you also touch on mind-body. I'm big on that. I'm a big fan of Dr John Sarno, who practised here at NYU.

Spencer Greenberg
He did a lot of, like, neuroplastic pain research.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah. And basically what he concluded was that a lot of physical problems are actually mind in origin. And his thesis was, essentially, as a society, many of us believe that certain emotions are unacceptable to display, and so we repress them. And according to Sarno, our body does not like that, and it compensates for that by giving you a physical symptom.

Spencer Greenberg
Right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And he found that only people who were open to the idea that their mind could somehow be involved were the ones that... His cure rate was ridiculous.

Spencer Greenberg
Right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
There's a movie that I helped finance called All the Rage , and it's about Dr Sarno and some of the people in it. I mean, honestly, they're in wheelchairs, and then the last bit shows them running in Central Park. And it seems miraculous. But he himself was always saying, "This is not miraculous. This is a well-known function." And he started doing it because he was trained as an MD, and he wasn't getting any results for the people coming to him in horrific pain. And so he tried to think about what else could be causing this. And I'm bringing this up because of what you said about certain activities that you're doing must have some benefit to you, or you wouldn't be doing them.

It might not be the best benefit in the world. But he said that when people did all of his homework and all of that and still didn't even get better, he made them make a list of the potential secondary benefits of you having, you know, your being unable to move your arm or get up off the couch. And in that, he found a lot of unlocks. Because people were like, "Oh, well, maybe it's because I crave sympathy," or, "I want my wife or husband to pay more attention to me," or any of those things. How do you go about, like, figuring that out in your own studies?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, it's such an interesting topic, and it's actually one I've been working on, an essay, for a while, about exactly this topic of illness that's connected to our psychology. I think we have to be very careful, because let's say that someone can't walk because of a back injury. They got a back injury, now they can't walk. There will be some subset of them that just need surgery, or there's some mechanical problem. And then there'll be some subset of them where none of the surgeries help. You know, basically doctors have nothing that benefits them. And fascinatingly, some fraction of that subset might actually benefit from these psychological ideas. They might discover that actually learning to not resist the pain, learning to not fear the pain that they feel, actually unlocks something. And suddenly they're getting more mobility back, and suddenly they're completely better.

And this is a real phenomenon. But I do want to be careful, because I do think we have to be careful about subpopulations, because there are subpopulations where I think the better model of what's going on is, like, some real physical malady.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
By the way, in all of his work, that's where he starts.

Spencer Greenberg
Exactly. And you kind of have to narrow down the group and say, "Okay, we've eliminated this, eliminated this. Now we're down to this group, where we've ruled out sort of all the physical things. Now let's explore the psychological." I think also, people often in that group can... And I really empathise with this. They can feel like they're being told, "Oh, it's just in your head. You're crazy," or something like this. And so I think it's also worth emphasising that kind of pain is just as real as any other pain. You experience it exactly like you experience any other pain. It doesn't feel any different. It's just a question of, are there psychological unlocks that can reduce the pain? And the answer is sometimes yes. And it's really interesting how these feedback loops can actually kind of sometimes maybe propagate signals.

And I think one way that can happen is someone can have a mental health challenge. Let's say severe anxiety, and they're feeling anxious just most of every day. Maybe they had a really traumatic experience that gave them PTSD, and now they're just living with constant anxiety. Well, anxiety leads to muscle tension, naturally, most likely because it kind of creates a... When something scary is happening, you want to run away or fight, so you're kind of tense. But now think about the effects of tensing all day long, every day. Like, oh yeah, you start having back pain, you start having neck pain. And then let's suppose now you go and you think of it as, "Oh, I have a physical problem." Now you're like, "Oh, I should baby my back. I should not do anything that tweaks my neck." And so now you're reducing your mobility.

And then, you know, three years go by, and you're now in this really restricted range of... And guess what happens when you restrict your range of movement? Then you start getting stiffness and soreness, and you're like, "It's getting worse." And they can completely spiral out of control. And for that person, the mental health thing might sit at the top of their... this whole chain of problems.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that is a classic example of negative compounding, right? You start with, "I'm going to baby this." And then, "Well, if I move this way, it doesn't hurt. Or if I sit this particular way, it doesn't hurt." And then all of that just feeds all of the rest of it, and you get to a kind of mental prison where nothing is helping. I think one of the things that I would love to do (and some of the fellows that we've funded have been actually looking into this) is... Wouldn't it be great for a general-purpose, robust solution, or at least a way to ameliorate some of the problems, to this? Because I think that, as you mentioned, whenever you say, "Well, maybe this is in your mind," that drives a lot of people really crazy.

Because, as you mentioned, and Sarno confirms, the pain that you're feeling is very real. That is not your... You know, that is real. In fact, a woman who died far too young, and was a researcher in this from the medical side, Candace Pert, wrote a book called Molecules of Emotion , in which she said it can actually start a chain reaction of things like neuropeptides, et cetera, flooding your system. So the thing has a mental origin, but has very real physical characteristics that reinforce that idea. I'm interested in what is the thesis of the paper that you're working on with this particular problem?

Spencer Greenberg
Yes. The essay I'm writing, the goal is to try to catalogue all the different types of physical challenges that can be caused or solved by psychological solutions. So we have these words like "psychosomatic," right? And actually, psychosomatic, as it's often used, just means a disorder, like a medical disorder, that is influenced by psychological factors. And if you define it that way, it's really kind of ridiculous, because you'd be like, well, yeah, a lot of them. Like, maybe more than half. Yeah, maybe most are influenced by psychology, right? You know, people get flare-ups when they're stressed, or they might have more trouble recovering if they're anxious, or whatever.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Dry mouth, if they're afraid of speaking.

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, exactly. So it's not quite the right word. And then we also have this idea of psychogenic illness, which are illnesses that are caused by psychological factors. But the thing I'm most interested in, actually, as far as I know, there is no term for. So I think of it as disorders that could be solved psychologically, either solved or very substantially improved psychologically. And there isn't really a term for that. So that's what I'm writing about, this class of disorders. And how do we think about what sort of types there are of them, and subtypes, and what do we make of this? Because I think right now, today, there's a shockingly large number of people that have pain that I think could be substantially improved psychologically.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, well, I look forward to reading that paper, because my Sarno experience was, when I was 37, I got a frozen neck, and I literally couldn't move my neck beyond that. And so I went to the doctors, as usual. I went to the orthopaedic guys, and they put me in traction. And we were at a bookstore. One of our family traditions was every weekend we would take our kids to a bookstore, and they could spend as much time as they wanted. But the deal was, you can also buy as many books as you want, but you gotta read them. Anyway, one of my younger children was hemming and hawing and couldn't decide on what she wanted to buy. And so I wandered over to the medical section, and I was looking for stuff on what do I do for a stiff neck.

And that's where I found Sarno. And I'm like, "Oh, this seems interesting," because when you look at his bio, he's an MD, he's working at NYU. And so I bought the book and I read it. And the first time I read it, I literally threw it across the room.

Spencer Greenberg
You're like, "No way, this is bullshit."

Jim O'Shaughnessy
My wife is like, "Why did you do that?" I went, "That is the biggest pile of horseshit I have ever read in my life. I can't believe that NYU is letting one of their doctors publish this bullshit." She picks it up and starts looking through it, and they describe personality types and things like that. She goes, "I suggest you read it again." I did. I ended up reading it like six times. And by the sixth time, I'm seeing myself on every page. But the thing was... And this was the hoped-for outcome, but I wasn't... I mean, my neck still wasn't moving... After that sixth read. I woke up, hadn't done anything different, and completely gone.

Spencer Greenberg
It's fascinating. I literally, just a few days ago, was talking to a pain researcher, and he was telling me about one of the people that he was interviewing about their experiences. And they literally, just the moment they read about the idea that your pain could just be psychological, this pain that they had for years just went away. Now, that's not the common case. That's the weird outlier. But it occasionally happens. It's almost like the brain can just suddenly be like, "Oh, wait a minute, I don't have to have pain now. Okay." Now, unfortunately, usually it's a lot more work than that, right?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, unfortunately. Sarno also talks about those, and he also underlines that these are outliers. But he has several patients who literally just... He would do lectures, and that was a required part of his therapy. And he talks about the rare individual who came to the first lecture, listened, and then, "I'm good. I was ready."

Spencer Greenberg
I think phantom limb syndrome is such a perfect example here, because it's this phenomenon where sometimes, when people have a limb removed, they'll feel a ton of pain in the missing limb, as though it's still there. Like, they might feel like their fist is still clenched in a really painful way, and they can't get rid of it. And this wonderful neuroscientist developed this strategy to help them, which is a mirror box, where, through a contraption of mirrors, they put their still-existing arm into the mirror box, and it makes it look like their other arm is there by mirroring it. And then he just has them unclench the fist in the now-mirrored arm, and their brain is like, "Oh, okay, it's fine now." And the pain goes away, and it sometimes just cures them essentially immediately.

And what I think it shows is that the brain is doing a lot of processing of information. Somehow, after the arm is removed, the brain is misprocessing the signal, thinking that the arm is still there, in some sense thinking that the fist is clenched when it's not. But by seeing the arm again, and seeing that it's unclenched, the brain is just like, "Oh, I can reinterpret the signal now." And suddenly the interpretation shifts. So it's a great proof of concept. It's not the same thing, but it's a proof of concept that sometimes the brain can just reinterpret a pain signal almost instantaneously.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And kind of perception is reality, right?

Spencer Greenberg
Well, pain, it's just what you experience. The problem with pain is that it feels bad. And if it felt different, then we would call it something else.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
So what's the future, do you think, for your work and the work of others? Are we going to be able to get to a place where we can provide the levers and materially help people who want to change? We talked earlier about how some people say they want to change but don't really want to change. But those who really want to change, what do you think?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah. So we wrote this book to try to make it easier. But I think technology can really help here as well. For people that buy the book, on our website, 12leversbook.com, we have a little AI bot you get...

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Oh, cool.

Spencer Greenberg
...that you can access, that just helps you apply the techniques from the book. So this is like a little assistant. It's not a therapist, but it can help you apply the techniques from the book. And I think technology actually has a lot that it can help with, both in helping people put things into action and also helping improve the science. Technology can actually help us do better science on humans. In terms of the application of it, I don't think we're at the point where everyone should be using AI as a therapist, but I do think that it can be an assistive tool for your self-improvement journey.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
So I have a thesis that AI might actually ultimately be a better therapist. And the reason I think that is, again, back to human nature. There are a lot of things that could be deep... You could perceive that you have a belief that you treat as a very deep, dark secret, and you're not even willing to share that with your human therapist, because of all the reasons, right? Embarrassment, or "What are they going to think of me now?", et cetera. Whereas that's not a problem, in my opinion, with a large language model. And I'm not advocating doing this now. I'm saying at some point in the future, when a lot of the things are locked down, and the hallucinations and the sycophancy and all of that goes away. What do you think about that idea?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, I think the out-of-the-box standard models people use today, like ChatGPT and Claude, I think if you say, "Okay, be my therapist," I think there's a lot of problems with that. Sycophancy is a huge problem. A good therapist will not reinforce your false perceptions. They won't necessarily just immediately say, "Oh, you're wrong." They'll probably do it more delicately. But they will not reinforce your false perceptions. But AIs will absolutely reinforce your false perceptions. And if you are the sort of person, let's suppose, that you are ruining your relationships but blaming it on other people, the AI will absolutely buy into that and convince you that it's all everyone else's fault.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
"It really was her fault."

Spencer Greenberg
Exactly. And I've seen people use it this way. It's very disturbing. That's the kind of thing that, with better technology and the right training, maybe they can improve that and make it better. I think they probably can improve that. So I think right now we do have to be careful. One day, yeah, the technology probably will get better and better for this kind of work. And as you point out, there are benefits too. People may not feel comfortable sharing with a therapist. On the other hand, they also may not feel comfortable giving it to some giant company who owns their deepest, darkest secret. So there's trade-offs here. And what are they going to do with that data, and what's the privacy on that? I think also there's other things.

For some things, actually having a human there actually is really important, as a social species. If you're talking about something that you feel deeply ashamed about, it may be different to have your therapist say, "That's okay," you know, versus your AI being like, "That's okay." It just may not... You know, we are humans, after all, right?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I've written four nonfiction books, all about the market. I'm taking my crack at my first fiction book. And one of the best prompts that I ever wrote... AI is very good at being critical, if you tell it to be.

Spencer Greenberg
Absolutely.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
So I wrote a prompt saying that this is the most intelligent, most erudite, most insightful reviewer of this genre of fiction, and he absolutely hates every chapter of your book.

Spencer Greenberg
That's funny.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And, literally, the feedback I got from that model saved me so many dumb things that I was putting into the book. And now, I'm not advocating that for a psychological therapist, but …

Spencer Greenberg
Most people don't have as thick of skin, where they're willing to be absolutely blasted by the AI, you know.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
But one of the things that I really thought about was, my wife graduated magna or summa cum laude in journalism. She's a great editor. And when I wrote my first book, she edited it. And boy, did that cause some rocky times in our relationship, because we were still doing everything on paper back then. And so I would give her something I was very proud of, and then it would come back a sea of red, and I would get upset. I would be legitimately upset, and I would blame her, right? "You just have no sense for any kind of beauty and elegance in writing." But the point was, we got in a real fight. And obviously, end of story, she was of course completely right. All of her changes were adopted and whatnot. But I used that example to myself, thinking, "I'm not going to get mad at an AI," right? And so I could take all... And boy, it was really... I mean, it was downright mean.

Spencer Greenberg
Did it hurt a little bit? Did you feel...?

Jim O'Shaughnessy
No. When I first read the first one, I was kind of like, "Oh my God." But then I thought, okay, if a person said that to me, I'd be really upset. But then I just was like, this is an autocomplete. And so the idea is that it says they're shit, they're actually shit, and I really need to redo them, rethink them.

Spencer Greenberg
I think a lot of people could benefit from editing the permanent custom instructions. So, you know, with Claude and ChatGPT, you can put in whatever you want in the moment, but you can also set permanent custom instructions that are always there. And I've found a lot of value from that. One thing I tell it is, whenever something is disputed, make the strongest case on all the plausible sides, so that I can see, "Oh, the case for this side, the case for that side," rather than just giving me one side of the argument. That's an example. Another is putting in the custom instructions to say that you value the truth more than finding out that you're right.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I have that one.

Spencer Greenberg
And always be, you know, brutally honest about the truth. And it actually makes a difference.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Huge. Yeah. Well, you are so much fun to talk to. I'm looking at my watch here. What, of the 12 Levers, which one surprised you the most?

Spencer Greenberg
One of the biggest surprises to me was, you think that you understand your problems in your life. And the more that I've kind of worked with people and researched this, I've come to think that actually we often don't have a full grasp of our challenges, and that actually holds us back. And I don't mean the challenge you had once you solved it. I mean the kind of recurring challenges that we face. Very often we have less understanding of them than we think. So a simple example would be, let's suppose you're getting into fights with your partner. You might think, "Oh, I understand why we're getting into fights. I want one thing, she wants a different thing." And that is a level of understanding. But then you might think to yourself, "Well, but other couples I know, they have the same situation. One of them wants one thing, the other one's the other thing. And yet they're not fighting about it. They seem to be able to resolve it."

So that's the second level of understanding: well, why are we actually not able to resolve it? And maybe it's because when you bring it up, you start to feel annoyed and she starts to feel annoyed, right? Okay. That leads to a third level of understanding: well, why is it that you're both getting annoyed in the situation? And so I think this is why, actually, in the very first chapter of the book, we start with Unravel the Causes, which is about what are the techniques to figure out the deeper underlying causes of what's going wrong in your life.

Because we often stop at the surface-level solutions, and better understanding leads to better solutions. So that, to me, I was surprised about: the power of that really simple idea of going deeper, and how often we fail to do that.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. And that ties in with all those other cultural norms, social norms and whatnot. And I found that very instructive. And as well, it's like, if you can... And staying with your example, if you can convince your partner, "Hey, I just read this great book. We keep fighting about this. Let's talk a little bit more about it. Like, why do you get pissed? Here's why I get pissed."

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, like going meta. It's sort of like we were talking about constructive disagreement earlier. If you're trying to win the argument or convince the other person you're right, that's probably what you've been doing all that time. If you flip to the meta and say, "Hey, why don't we have a discussion about why is it that we don't resolve this? What's going on, on the meta level? Imagine we're aliens looking at the situation. What would we observe?" Sometimes that can be more productive, and give you a lot more insight.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
I tried that years and years ago with my wife, and I presented it as, "What would a disinterested observer, sitting here listening to us, think about what we're talking about?"

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
And she goes, "Is he your disinterested...?" And so I immediately went, "There are two disinterested observers." And that is kind of a variation of this, and that's also pretty helpful. It's why, in certain polling innovations that I think are interesting, because they get the prediction better, instead of asking somebody, "Who are you going to vote for in the midterms?", they say, "Who do you think your neighbour is going to vote for in the midterms?" And those have actually proven to be far better predictions of the actual outcome.

Well, Spencer, this has been so much fun. I was really looking forward to it. I love your work. I think kudos for being willing to read 100 and... How many was it? 106 you went through?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, it was over 100.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah. That must have been trying, particularly with some of them. If you know the show, our final question is: we're going to make you emperor of the world, just for a day. Two things you can't do: you can't kill anyone, and you can't put anybody in a re-education camp. But what you can do is, we're going to hand you a magical microphone. You can say two things into it, and the two things you say are going to incept the entire population of the world. They're going to wake up whenever their morning happens to be, and they're going to say, "I just had two of the best ideas ever. And unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually act on these two ideas." What are you going to incept into the world?

Spencer Greenberg
Yeah. So I think the first would be that, in order to figure out the truth, you have to use methods that reliably create truth. That sounds like a simple idea, but it means that if you believe the people that are charismatic, you're going to believe what charismatic people say. If you believe what your family tells you, you're going to believe what your family tells you. And so if you think about the methods we use to arrive at the truth, and we say, "Well, would I endorse that? Would I endorse everyone using that method of figuring out the truth?" Listening to charismatic people, or trusting whatever your family says, it's obviously not a reliable method in general. So it also shouldn't be the way that you try to figure out truth. You need more. And so, trying to think of...

I would try to get everyone to think about, well, what are the methods that actually reliably lead to truth? And, for example, if you want to figure out whether something works for humans, the best we have, the best that science has to offer, is basically: randomise people, give it to a bunch of them and don't give it to another group, and then compare. Every other method is pretty much worse than that. And I think if everyone understood that, why we need methods like that, and why we need to check what it says before we go and believe things, I think we would have a better world. So that would be my first one.

My second would be to reiterate something we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is that we often don't understand the deeper causes of what's going on. And we talked about it on an individual level, but I think it actually really applies at a societal level. If we're trying to solve a problem, like improve homelessness, if you have the wrong causal understanding of what's going on, it will lead you to be very inefficient at solving the problem, and probably never come close. So I think very often, when people are going about trying to do things in the world, trying to improve the world, they stop at some explanation, and then they just go all in on that explanation. And they need to go deeper and say, "Well, these complex problems, they're multifactorial, but we really have to understand the different causal drivers, and we need to target the key causal drivers, or we're never really going to make progress." So that would be the other one.

Jim O'Shaughnessy
Both are great. I think they would improve the world immeasurably, as will your book. Spencer, thank you so much for joining me on Infinite Loops.

Spencer Greenberg
Thanks so much for having me on.

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