0:00
We're constantly in a state of forgetting.
Search this video
0:01
Almost everything that happens to us is just gone for memory.
0:04
>> Are we constantly overwriting our memories?
0:06
When we remember things, we can distort them during the memory process that as you recall them, it's not like pulling a file from a drawer.
0:14
It's kind of like generating a file from scanned information.
0:16
Is it just the way that our brains are structured or is there something more?
0:20
My view is a clean evolutionary story where brains are optimized for survival and not really other things.
0:26
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 a more robust science anyway I can and to then help use that science to improve the world.
0:40
My guest today is Spencer Greenberg, founder of Sparkwave and Clearerthinking.
0:44
org and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast.
0:47
His new book, The 12 Levers, boils down 106 self-help books and 23 therapies into 12 core strategies for improving your life.
1:01
Well, welcome to Infinite Loop Spencer.
1:04
I've been a longtime fan of yours, as you know.
1:06
I was on your podcast uh where we talked about some of my challenges in trying to design a system that would help me make better choices on Wall Street.
1:18
Um your book 12 levers is fabulous.
1:23
Uh 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.
1:32
Um, and we will get into the book, but I want to start in a different place. Close your eyes. >> All right.
1:40
Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me, but yeah, I'll close my eyes.
1:42
I don't know where this is going. >> Okay.
1:44
This is something that I read that you advocated, and it's about perception.
1:51
With your eyes closed, describe what I'm wearing.
1:55
>> Uh, so I think you're wearing a kind of gray button-down shirt. K. That's That's correct.
2:02
Anything else you can describe? >> Nope.
2:06
I literally have no I didn't notice anything else.
2:09
>> Okay, open them up again.
2:09
Are you a fan of Robert Anton Wilson? >> No. >> Okay.
2:15
He he has this idea that we all have different perceptual reality tunnels. He calls them.
2:21
And he once did something similar.
2:24
By the way, everyone listening and watching, this was Spencer's essay that I read and that's why we did this exercise.
2:30
Um, but what he did was even more aggressive.
2:34
He had was giving a class and the first day it's down a long hall in a college.
2:40
The first day, everyone, all his students came in and he told them, "I'm closing the door.
2:48
Everyone take out a blank sheet of paper, draw the hallway."
2:50
M >> and what he discovered is every drawing was different.
2:59
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 the exercise we just did can be helpful.
3:18
One thing I think is important to realize is that we're constantly in a state of forgetting.
3:21
Almost everything that happens to us is just gone for memory.
3:25
And what we're left with are these little samples that we then build story as that of that or what we tell ourselves about our lives.
3:31
Uh that can really matter in relationships and it can really matter in lots of different areas of life where uh let's say we have an interaction with a person.
3:39
We leave the interaction feeling angry, but then the constant forgetting means that we actually forget most of what happened there.
3:45
And now we from those little bits and pieces, we try to retell the story of why we're angry.
3:48
And it probably involves the other person doing something wrong and us being right naturally.
3:55
>> Uh, and so there's a technique that I really like that I called the inner why technique.
3:58
It's 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.
4:06
And as soon as it shifts, you just ask why. Why did it shift?
4:11
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.
4:17
You know, one thing that was said, one thought that you had.
4:18
And it's typically very easy to pinpoint why am I feeling that negative emotion.
4:22
And it can increase your awareness, make you better at navigating difficult emotions, help you better understand how what your role is in these situations.
4:30
Uh 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.
4:39
>> And I also read when I was reading your stuff, we have something like thousands of thoughts a day.
4:45
And if at the end of the day you asked me, hey Jim, how many thoughts do you have today?
4:50
I'd probably say either none or a couple.
4:51
And that's that constant forgetting, right?
4:59
As a longtime journal keeper, so I've kept journals, not diaries, but what I'm thinking, etc. for 40 years.
5:08
>> One of the things that I was really blown away by was being called a liar in my own handwriting. I had a memory.
5:14
It was about the first Gulf War and I was at a cocktail party here in Manhattan and everybody was this was when we did did the second Gulf War, right?
5:26
And everybody that was in the conversation had the same view.
5:30
Well, you know, I supported George Senior going in because after all, they invaded Kuwait and everything, but I do not support this particular uh incursion into uh Iraq. I said the same thing.
5:45
I would have sworn in court that that was what I believed.
5:51
And then I don't know a couple days later I was looking for something in my journals from that period and I found I did not support the first Gulf War and I was really struck.
6:04
So I started going back and I started seeing wow are we constantly overwriting our memories?
6:16
There's a wonderful study that illustrates this really well.
6:18
illustrates this really well. the 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 you what were you doing when you found out you what was going on for you right at that moment and then years later he had those same
6:35
students write again the same question what were you doing when the spatial 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 like I don't think that it was actually me because they just couldn't believe that that their memory could be so wrong. It it's really
6:52
It it's really uh can be disruptive this idea that we don't remember things, right?
6:58
It's so core to our identity the these facts about our history, but I think that we just have to accept that that 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.
7:12
That as you recall them, it's not like pulling a file from a drawer.
7:17
It's kind of like generating a file from scanned information.
7:19
One way to see that is if you try to remember your childhood home, you kind of picture it in your mind.
7:25
You'll probably be able to visualize it to some extent.
7:27
But then if you ask a really specific question about it, what color was the doororknob?
7:33
You'll probably have an answer, but most likely it's just going to be filled in in that moment, right?
7:36
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.
7:43
Our brains are kind of autocompleting but then the next time you recall that memory now the door knob might be remembered.
7:47
It's now you're not autocompleting, you're remembering your previous autocomplete.
7:53
>> And so we are overwriting, right?
7:53
And do we do that for coherence sake?
7:56
Do we do what's your thesis on why that happens?
8:03
Is it just the way that our brains are structured or is there something more?
8:08
Well, I think it's it's somewhat debated, but my view is there's a clean evolutionary story where, you know, our brains are optimized for survival and uh not really other things, right?
8:18
They're really just trying to get our genes to survive to the next generation and propagate.
8:22
And if you think of it that way, we don't need to remember all these little details, right?
8:25
We need to remember the big picture stuff, the important stuff.
8:28
And in fact, it might challenge our memory storage if we could if we actually could remember everything.
8:34
Maybe we run out of space.
8:36
Uh 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 you know other memories for example and just oh well it's you know the door knob probably look like that because that's what doorork knobs look like.
8:53
And the the thing that fascinates me is that can cause all sorts of trouble.
9:02
And is there a technique?
9:02
My technique tends to be I document like almost everything.
9:09
>> Uh when when you leave, I'm going to do a series of notes in here about our conversation.
9:16
>> Uh and I found that that's very very helpful for me to to do.
9:20
Um, are there other strategies or is it even advisable to want to be able to remember more of the actual things that transpired? >> Yeah.
9:35
I think that it's important to focus on what you actually want to remember and why.
9:39
Because a lot of these details of our lives, we don't actually need to remember them.
9:43
>> Well, we need to remember certain important things.
9:45
Like for example, when you read a non-fiction 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.
9:54
If you don't take any notes at any point and never review them, there's a pretty good chance, you know, in three years someone says, "What was that book about?"
10:00
And you're like, you can remember like one or two things.
10:03
And so if it was a really valuable book, I think it is worth worth taking, you know, a just a small amount of extra time can help consolidate those important memories.
10:11
But at the same time, I don't think we want to get lost and think, "Oh, I need to remember everything."
10:17
Try to grip onto everything. It's just not realistic. So, what is really key?
10:20
What are the things that you really care about knowing?
10:22
And then you can use simple techniques like make notes, but then review those notes at certain periodicity.
10:27
Uh, space repetition can be a really powerful technique for this where if you're trying to remember something, you don't need to review it every day.
10:35
In fact, after you've learned it, you can review it at at longer and longer intervals to keep it in memory.
10:40
So maybe the first time you review the next day, then the next week, then you know 3 weeks later and so on.
10:45
And if you get it wrong, then you review at faster intervals again.
10:48
But if you get it right, you can keep making the intervals longer and longer. >> Yeah.
10:52
I also have kind of a weird memory in that if I read something, my recall of it is pretty high.
11:00
>> 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.
11:06
Um uh are are those types of preferences, if you will, um uh do do they lead to different ways of thinking?
11:18
Do you think there's this fascinating phenomena where many people report having certain types of learning work better than for them than other types?
11:28
But the research on this is actually really kind of surprising because there's essentially no good research that demonstrates that by giving people different types of learning materials like some people are auditory learners, some are visual learners and by you know making the right learning material for their type actually produces better educational outcomes.
11:45
So that's the strange thing is that the research is out of sync with what many people just anecdotally experience.
11:51
And that might be because uh the concept is fraud, 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.
12:00
Then you'd have to have a bunch of versions of your educational materials.
12:04
They're well optimized for each type.
12:05
Maybe that's just a really high bar that so uh so in practice there's actually very little known about how to kind of specialize information for people's learning type.
12:14
>> One thing when I was younger, I was into neural linguistic programming.
12:17
Um, and so auditory, canesthetic, visual.
12:20
Um, and I did find, and of course this is pretty neat documentary of everything.
12:28
I did find that if I listened closely, I could pretty much grock what style my conversant preferred.
12:40
>> And so, uh, you don't say, does that ring a bell to you to somebody who's a visual thinker, right?
12:45
you want to say, can you see the big picture?
12:48
And I did find that by making just small adjustments to the way I was talking to the person.
12:56
When I switched over to their preferred method, they became more engaged. They relaxed.
13:03
It was very interesting to me.
13:07
I I wish I would have documented that more.
13:08
Well, that's a really interesting example of something that we actually we talk about in our book, The 12 Lovers, around how you can actually transform conversations with people by learning to pay more attention.
13:20
Very often when people are in conversations, they're like maybe they're 80% focused on the other person, but there's they're a little bit thinking about what they're going to do tomorrow.
13:28
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.
13:32
And it can really actually be transformational really trying to give the other person your complete interested attention and and really trying to be fully there with them.
13:44
If you if you hear about people who met like Bill Clinton or the Dolly Llama, they'll often mention things like this like they felt like even this important person was suddenly fully there with them.
13:54
And it really really like strikes a chord with people.
13:56
And I think we can all learn to do that better.
13:58
And so I think the example you're giving is actually it's a great example of this of what happens when you learn to pay more attention.
14:03
You start noticing things you've never noticed.
14:05
I I had a instance where I was at a holiday party and this guy who come comes to 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.
14:17
Um so he comes talk to me and I'm like okay I'm just going to I'm going to really try to give him my complete full interested attention 100%.
14:24
And I did it and it was the first time ever I had a really good conversation with him and I was like, "Wow, maybe this is a me problem.
14:30
Maybe maybe this guy's fine."
14:32
And that really, you know, changed my thinking on this.
14:36
And then how did you incorporate that?
14:38
How did you habituate that?
14:38
Because that's a, you know, there's a lot of great advice in your book, but I think you've got to habituate the behavior if it's going to make any difference, right? >> Yeah.
14:53
So, one of the really useful ideas is trying to pick a trigger, right?
14:56
So, you have a trigger and then you're going to say, "Okay, in the next five times I see this trigger, I'm going to make sure to do this thing."
15:03
And if you can stick with it five times, that will make the sixth more likely and the seventh more likely, etc.
15:07
So, for me, the trigger is when a, you know, one-on-one conversation starts with someone, then my that's that's going to trigger.
15:14
Okay, like now I'm going to try to really really focus on this person, really try to pay attention.
15:19
It's still something I'm working on.
15:20
I could I could certainly still improve.
15:21
Uh but already I feel like it pays the gains in my life even if I don't do it perfectly. >> Yeah.
15:27
And your mention of I I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Clinton after he was president and I was blown away by the attention he paid to me.
15:38
I felt literally it might have been a five-minute conversation but I felt like he was a millionw light bulb and all of that energy was just focused on me given the way he asked questions etc.
15:52
And again, this is a fiveinut conversation.
15:56
>> That's exactly That's exactly what I'm talking about.
15:58
>> And and so he clearly has mastered that.
16:02
And then you add to it, he's like, "Oh, Shaughnessy Gway, right?" Like, "Yeah."
16:09
Um, and I I just found that really really interesting.
16:12
I think that that gives people a tremendous advantage, right?
16:18
Because I find that a lot of people are really not listening.
16:24
What they're doing is thinking about how they're going to respond. >> Yeah.
16:27
>> And that's why you get these people on TV shouting at each other and like, you know, I did not blah blah blah blah blah.
16:35
And that no real communication has taken place. >> Yeah.
16:39
And it's it not only causes other people to like us more, but importantly, it often makes conversation more interesting for both people. >> Totally.
16:46
because you're by being really focused on what they're saying, you often notice nuances that you would completely miss.
16:52
You notice directions you want to take the conversation.
16:54
And you know, as some, you know, I have my own podcast, Cleric Thinking, which you've been on, and I don't know if you've observed this, but having done hundreds of interviews, I realized that I when I was a, you know, younger interviewer, I would often miss important conversational branches that by paying more attention, I actually now start to pick up on more.
17:12
you just realize, "Oh, wait.
17:13
There's a really interesting thread here."
17:14
And we could have just blown right past it. >> Yeah.
17:18
Um, and when I was designing this podcast, I I I don't know uh if you've ever seen the movie My Dinner with Andre.
17:28
>> Uh, it's a 1980, I think, uh, movie.
17:31
Anyway, it's just a conversation, literally. And it's riveting.
17:36
>> It's literally ri riveting.
17:36
And you you feel like you're a fly on the wall in this conversation.
17:41
But one of the things that happens between the two is they actually listen to each other and then they disagree, they agree, etc.
17:50
But they also go down tangents, right?
17:54
It's like when I started doing podcasting, I would say, "Yeah, we'll get to that later." Big mistake.
18:02
Like if you see some if you see an opening, take it then and the conversation just becomes a more interesting but also just more authentic because you know why are you going to remember something we covered now 20 minutes from now?
18:20
Why don't we cover it now?
18:21
Um what more can people do?
18:24
I I I think that we have a situation where people literally maybe it's because our perception filters, our reality bubbles, tunnels are are different, so different from one another that you know, same movie as Scott Adams would say two, you know, two same movie, two different screens, right?
18:49
Do you think there are some techniques that people could could study and then habituate that would make communication more fruitful?
18:59
>> I've actually run a number of workshops on productive disagreement where we bring people together in a room.
19:04
We have them fill out a long list of things that they agree on, they agree to, they disagree to.
19:10
So, you know, hot button political topics, things like that. >> Sure.
19:15
>> Then we match them with the stranger in the room.
19:16
We have them overlay their sheets and find something that where one of them strongly agrees and one strongly disagrees.
19:21
And we're like, "Okay, you're going to talk about that, but you're going to do it in a special way.
19:24
You're not just going to have a normal conversation.
19:26
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."
19:35
So, well, the person B is like, "Yep, you got it. You understand me."
19:39
And then they switch roles.
19:40
And now the other one asks open-ended questions till they fully understand the other person's point of view.
19:45
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 the final phase they work together as a team collaboratively to try to figure out the root of their disagreement >> and they they win together by figuring out the root not by proving they're right or convincing the other person.
20:04
So, I call these productive disagreements and I uh 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.
20:17
You know, we actually disagreed less than I thought or like I don't agree with the other person, but like I understand the point of view now."
20:22
Um, and so I find that a much more useful way to think about things rather than a debate.
20:28
>> Um, are you familiar with Gruin, Nick Gruin's work?
20:30
He's an Australian and he advocates for the jury system because this is the result, right?
20:36
They didn't intend it to be the result, but when you've got the one hold out, guilty as hell, the other one, no, did nothing wrong.
20:46
They literally have to solve the problem, right?
20:51
And so you get a much different outcome when you jury something as opposed to the standard political stump speech.
21:00
This is why you're going to love fill in the blank, right?
21:03
Data centers or or what have you.
21:06
And it seems to, at least the research of his that I'm familiar with, it seems to lead to much better outcomes.
21:12
One of the things that I started doing aggressively when uh large language models got better was to always steal man agree or or points of view that I disagree with.
21:26
And you're right, I I don't think I've yet done a steel man.
21:29
I do them on everything, right?
21:32
Really hot button topics.
21:34
Um, and I don't think I've ever steelmanned an argument that I really vehemently disagree with or I haven't looked at it and said they do have a point.
21:48
And and so it it's helped me to update my priors, right?
21:51
Because I think that we all have this idea that we're right. Right.
22:00
And we're often not even close to right.
22:04
were often very wrong and and so I've always been fascinated by mental models as you know and and what 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 a algorithmic quant investor right it was basically to guard against the emotions that all investors face and I just saw by reading history. Wow.
22:35
When the emotions take over, watch out.
22:38
Uh fear, greed, hope, and ignorance are the four horsemen of the investment apocalypse, and only ignorance can be dealt with.
22:45
Um you you do something fun uh with your parties.
22:53
We're going to shift over there.
22:55
Uh I I was absolutely fascinated.
22:59
Just to briefly I'm going to let you describe it, but you have parties here in New York uh where you can never use the same format twice.
23:07
Um I I want to get to why that is, but the things you've covered I think is are just so cool.
23:15
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.
23:25
First off, what inspired you to have parties like this?
23:32
And what more importantly did you learn from the outcome of these parties? >> Yes.
23:37
So I run a group called Ergo and we're social experiments groups.
23:40
We throw social experiments and as you said, we have a rule.
23:43
were never allowed to repeat the same format twice.
23:44
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.
23:55
And honestly, I just started getting bored of it.
23:56
I was just like, I'm getting bored by my own events. Uh how do we do better?
24:01
And also in a world of, you know, when you can go listen to the greatest podcasts or watch, you know, 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?
24:12
didn't make that much sense to me as the world changed.
24:15
So then I was like, okay, we want to try to try new formats.
24:17
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.
24:23
And I made this giant list and analyze, well, what is each one good for?
24:27
So then we started using some of those little more out of the box formats.
24:31
And then I was like, well, I want I want even more.
24:34
And so finally I was like, okay, we're just going to make a group rule.
24:35
We can never use the form same format twice.
24:39
And to be honest, it became a form of creativity for me.
24:41
You know, some people like working with clay or painting.
24:42
And for me, creating social experiments is just like my creative hobby. Yeah. So, I I really enjoy it.
24:48
And I think of it as this fascinating thing where you kind of, you know, you drop a a rock into the pond and all these ripples come out and you don't know where it's going to be.
24:56
So, you bring people together and you have some change in social dynamics and different things happen and it can be extremely unpredictable.
25:02
You don't necessarily know until you run the event what's going to happen.
25:05
Sometimes it's quite shocking.
25:07
And uh not to give away any confidences or anything that might have happened, but what what are a couple of examples where you were going into the party expecting one thing, coming out of the party thinking, whoa. >> Yeah.
25:23
So, one of the one of the strangest is we did an event we called social called um sensory deprivation socializing.
25:30
>> And so, the first half of the event when people arrived before they even entered, we blindfolded them.
25:33
They knew this was going to happen.
25:35
So, you know, what shock?
25:36
But so they didn't get to see anyone and 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 like most of them have never met.
25:42
So they're interacting with people they they've never met they can't see them.
25:45
They're trying to understand like okay what are social norms like when when you can't see someone and it you know it was kind of funny because they would make these social f pause without realizing it.
25:56
Like they'd be standing way too close to other people or way too far away.
25:57
People would get confused at what conversation they were part of what others were a part of.
26:01
Suddenly some of us start talking and they're like I didn't know there was a person in this conversation.
26:05
Um, so that was kind of funny.
26:05
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.
26:15
So, do you want to guess what happened?
26:17
There were a bunch of strangers.
26:17
They're going to be socializing for 45 minutes, but no sound.
26:20
What do you think would happen?
26:22
I I personally would think depending on the group of strangers that you put together that there would be maybe an a paro distribution with 20% having intense really cool conversations with somebody that they never if they could see them probably would not have had that conversation and 80% awkward. >> Yeah.
26:47
So, well, so the second half once we no longer allowed them to make any sound, the the really strange thing happened.
26:53
At first, people were like, "Okay, I'm just going to try to communicate."
26:55
So, they would write things down or, you know, try to get communication without this without sound.
27:00
But that is basically just a bad form of talking. It's less effective.
27:04
Obviously, if you're trained in it, that's one thing, but they're not.
27:05
So, then the strangest thing started happening.
27:08
People started dancing with each other, like total strangers, even though there's no music.
27:12
People started like with consent exchanging massages.
27:16
And then someone invented like a little improv game and people started copying it.
27:19
And so by the end like 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 like where this just suddenly erupts.
27:29
And I was like just by removing sound so we completely change the social dynamic.
27:35
>> Uh that is that one you wish you could repeat?
27:38
Well, it would be interesting to try that in like different different formats and, you know, kind of vary it in different ways and see what would happen.
27:46
>> I I uh if you looked at u when I took your ultimate personality test, uh I got all the same things that I always got.
27:52
I I'm always score off the charts on extraversion.
27:57
I'm married to an introvert.
28:00
>> And so, um, this has caused all sorts of trouble >> because I will literally go up to anyone and talk to, um, and we were in Miami and I saw a guy vaping.
28:11
This is back when vaping was just starting, but he looked literally like a member of the Hell's Angels. He had tats everywhere.
28:20
He had the chains and everything. He was sitting.
28:22
He was obviously the bouncer for this club.
28:24
I saw him and my wife is don't you dare.
28:30
So I I wanted to know why somebody like him was vaping as opposed to smoking.
28:38
>> And so I went over and struck up a conversation with him.
28:40
Had the best 45minute conversation in a long time.
28:46
Turns out very thoughtful guy, like really interesting life.
28:50
We talked about a lot of different things.
28:53
But then when we got to the vaping, I said, "So what gives?"
28:57
And he goes, "My old lady man."
29:02
But I find that if you're willing to like 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.
29:15
And yeah, I I was fascinated by when I was listening to you with Chris, you were talking about your own uh sort of social anxiety and how you cured that. Um, how's that going?
29:28
>> Yeah, it's uh it's it's been a lifelong project, but it's bit uh phenomenally better than when I was younger.
29:33
So, uh and for anyone listening who's interested, we have this personality test called the ultimate personality test. It's free.
29:38
It's on our website, clearthinking.
29:40
org, so you can check that out.
29:41
That's what Jim was referring to.
29:43
But yeah, so social anxiety I had since I was a child.
29:45
It was always a a problem for me.
29:47
And then when I was in my early 20s, I was like, "Okay, I really need to do something about this."
29:51
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 like I would feel like I was going to die even though, of course, it's completely irrational.
30:03
I was totally safe, but on some level my brain was predicting something really bad was going to happen.
30:08
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."
30:15
And I was like, "Oh, what's the strategy?"
30:18
He's like, "Okay, I'm going to give you homework.
30:21
Every weekend you're going to go to a bar alone and you're going to introduce yourself to five strangers."
30:26
This was absolutely terrifying to me.
30:26
As an extrovert, you're probably like, "Yeah, no big deal, whatever."
30:29
But I it was, you know, truly terrifying to me.
30:32
And so, we started small.
30:32
We made a fear hierarchy of like things that were a little bit frightening, a little more frightening, etc.
30:37
And the first level was just go up to people, ask them what time it was.
30:40
And even that would make me really anxious.
30:43
>> But we I would practice that until it became easy and then I moved my way up.
30:46
The next one was go up to people, ask them what drink they're drinking.
30:49
And I found that a little more difficult than asking the time, etc.
30:51
And it culminated all the way in the 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?"
31:00
And you know, I was like, "I'm going to die.
31:03
They're going to punch me in the face."
31:05
But uh yeah, nobody ever attacked me or you know worse they just said no or they laughed or you know and some of them gave me hugs and uh and you know it had a dramatic effect on my social anxiety.
31:14
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 you know where I'm just like in situations that used to be terrifying and just totally fine.
31:27
And that's kind of like exposure therapy, right?
31:29
You you just expose them a little bit more and more.
31:33
Are are there other therapies uh that you came across in in writing uh the book that would be equally as effective? >> Yes.
31:44
It's uh it's fascinating because you know 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.
31:53
There there's a ton of really good research showing that it can dramatically improve people's anxiety.
31:58
And there's some nuances in how to do it exactly.
32:00
And in in the in the 12 letters book, we we talk about the right way to do it and and kind of traps people fall into.
32:07
But there are other methods that also have uh really really robust evidence.
32:11
And one of them is for depression.
32:12
It's known as behavioral activation.
32:14
It turns out that even though depressed people often have a lot of negative thinking, they often they might feel hopeless about the future.
32:22
They might hate themselves and things like that.
32:23
Um they also started reducing their pleasurable activities.
32:27
So they tend to start doing less and less of the things they really enjoy.
32:31
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.
32:40
>> They say, "Oh yeah, I know I normally like that, but I'm just not in the mood.
32:42
I'm not going to have fun."
32:44
>> And so there's a really simple but but quite effective technique, which is you get people to run kind of behavioral 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.
32:56
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.
33:02
And very often depressed people find that they enjoy it more than they thought.
33:05
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 actually can help break them out of these depression spirals.
33:12
And there's been a lot of really good research on this technique and actually works quite well.
33:17
>> And uh exercise is another one, right?
33:20
Um if you're depressed, exercising like taking long walks can also be helpful.
33:26
Yeah, exercise is just one of it's like, you know, the closest we have to like the the miracle drug, which is just it helps with so many things, including mental health. Yeah.
33:34
So, that's always a great place to start.
33:36
Of course, if people who are depressed often struggle to do things like exercise, I think there's way too much emphasis put on the optimal form of exercise.
33:45
>> Yes, if you're a super athlete, yeah, you're already exercising, you know, five times a week, sure, think about optimizing.
33:50
But for most people, I think you want to go the opposite way.
33:52
I ask people, what is the type of exercise you most enjoy in the world?
33:56
You find the most fun, most well, you'd actually like look forward to it.
34:00
It doesn't feel like it takes willpower.
34:01
If anything, it should be the opposite.
34:03
It should feel like a guilty pleasure to go do it. Do that first, right?
34:06
And so for me, like I love mixed martial arts.
34:09
So, so that you know, if I'm doing mixed martial arts, I enjoy that.
34:13
If I have to go run, oh my gosh, that's going to be a lot harder. >> Yeah.
34:16
And that seems so in line with common sense, right?
34:24
you and by the way uh I'm glad you did it so I didn't have to you read 106 books I think uh with uh many therapies also and I think the final number that you came out with was 500 various takes on how to improve etc.
34:41
I as you know I'm I'm very much I I love data and how many of them just turned out to be like without any empirical support at all that people were actually like buying into. Yeah.
35:01
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.
35:10
like you could have a technique that actually could be quite good, but nobody really, you know, it's never been really empirically tested.
35:16
So, you know, that is there's a distinction there.
35:17
Um, I think that there really are some popular ideas in self-improvement that are pernicious, like they actually make people's lives worse.
35:23
And often the way that they operate is that they give an initial boost.
35:28
So, you might think, oh, this is really helpful to me, but they might cause harm in the long term.
35:32
One of the ones I would point to there is the law of attraction.
35:36
So the this very popular idea that thoughts become things then and so the idea is not if you believe in something enough then you'll go take action to cause it to happen.
35:45
That's specifically not what they're claiming.
35:48
They're claiming that believing something enough causes it to happen without you having to take any action.
35:53
So for anyone who believes this I 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. This works.
36:03
Um, but it's it's a really pernicious idea because it basically tells you if you believe hard enough it will happen.
36:09
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.
36:19
So, you get this initial kick. Yeah.
36:22
>> But then the problem is that's just not the way the universe works.
36:23
And if bad things happen to you, it can make you easily blame yourself because, oh wait, you got sexually assaulted.
36:30
Well, what kind of thoughts were you having?
36:32
I was like, "Oh my god, that's that's actually a horrendous philosophy." >> Yeah.
36:36
And uh the I I do think that there the kernel of uh truth in the law of attraction is what you covered. You got to take action. >> Yes.
36:49
>> You you like I make fun I have a friend who is always uh saying, "Well, you can do this, Jim, blah."
36:54
And and I tell him, "Well, manifest it for me." Mhm.
36:58
>> Uh and and he goes, "No, I'm far too lazy to take any action to do that."
37:02
But wh why then does that book is it just because kind of the something for nothing?
37:11
People want the easy path.
37:11
I I wrote a when threads were still a big thing on Twitter, I got really triggered when I was reading one of these, you know, these are the 10 rules of success.
37:26
these entrepreneurs do this and I'm immediately like biased sample like self- selected sample everything you're saying here is ma 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.
37:57
That's probably not going to happen.
37:59
Um, what other techniques?
38:03
But, 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.
38:15
Is it just the desire to, wow, I don't have to make an effort and look, everything's going to be mine.
38:24
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 so spectacular.
38:33
And because I was like you and I overcame it, I can teach you the trick to doing it.
38:37
And by the way, the trick is easy and simple and fast and it works for everyone all the time."
38:41
And of course, none of that's really true, right?
38:45
Even the best techniques in the world often won't work for everyone, right?
38:49
They'll maybe they'll work for a third of people.
38:50
The best techniques in the world.
38:51
And then there's also that doesn't work for anybody.
38:53
Uh so uh yeah, but that's a really really appealing pitch.
38:57
And sometimes it's they use other things to make it sound more exciting like they'll shroud it in mystery, you know, like a lot of the the law of attraction stuff is like this is Ben Franklin was actually using this and that's what made him so successful.
39:09
We'll teach you the secret of Ben Franklin or whatever it is.
39:13
So isn't there also some kind of transference?
39:16
You wrote a piece uh or did a podcast on I can't remember which.
39:21
I saw the transcript, so I don't know if you wrote it as an essay or not, but where people immediately associate celebrities andor 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."
39:38
Do do people attach more importance to that because of who is saying it?
39:44
People often describe irrationality as though it was about the individual.
39:50
You because we have all these cognitive biases in our brains.
39:54
You know, we tend to, you know, jump to conclusions.
39:56
We tend to ignore certain types of evidence, have confirmation bias, etc.
39:59
And that's all true, but I think actually a significant part of irrationality is social.
40:07
We as humans, we when we trust someone and they tell us a thing, we assume that it's true by default.
40:12
like maybe later we'll, you know, we'll get some evidence that cause us to argue against it.
40:16
But but if they're a person we trust that we consider them an authority or someone who's trying to work in our interest, then we we absorb the information.
40:22
And this can obviously be really useful depending on who you surround yourself with. >> Sure.
40:28
>> But it also means that people often adopt beliefs without ever thinking about them merely because they come from their trusted authorities.
40:34
And uh and um and I think that this leads actually to a tremendous amount of misinformation being spread and then those people spread to others not not trying to harm anyone but just because they believed it themselves.
40:46
And so it's so important that you vet your authorities, right?
40:50
And uh and it's interesting to think about well how do you know who's like a legitimate authority or who's a trustworthy authority?
40:55
And there are kind of certain signs that you can look for.
40:58
One is does the person explain why they believe the thing?
41:01
>> And if they do then you can go just check it.
41:03
You don't have to do it every time, but like check at least a few times.
41:05
Oh, they said that they bleeded because of the XYZ. Well, let's go.
41:08
Let's just go check that that's true.
41:10
Uh, have they ever changed their mind about something, right?
41:12
That's always a really good sign.
41:14
Like, oh, wait, this person said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I got that thing wrong. I said this. It's actually this."
41:19
Like, that's a that's a, you know, should update your view.
41:20
This is a more credible authority. Okay.
41:24
So, one of the things that at OSV I encourage is original mistakes.
41:27
I I sort of think mistakes are portals of discovery if handled the right way.
41:37
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.
41:45
How would you let's say I sent you a brilliant young founder, right?
41:52
And she really talks the talk.
41:57
She's going to talk to you about basian 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, you know, uh, confirmation bias, etc.
42:14
How would you disentangle her wonderful way with words to find out what 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 uh her to Grock.
42:42
Yeah, she she read it all and she memorized it all, but I don't think she's really putting it to the kind of use that I want her to.
42:52
That that would be quite the that would be quite the pitch.
42:56
Uh for one thing, I think knowledge for these for these kinds of biases can be helpful, but it's very far from actually solving the issue, right?
43:04
Like you can know everything about the sun cost fallacy and still fall for the sun cost fallacy.
43:09
In fact, almost everyone does even when they know about it, right?
43:10
Or you can do all the anchoring and still get anchored in a negotiation, right?
43:14
And and because knowledge is not enough.
43:17
So what else do you need besides knowledge?
43:19
Well, you need to actually think of the right thing at the right moment, right?
43:22
So let's say you're in a negotiation and they throw out the first price.
43:24
Just theoretically knowing about anchoring doesn't help.
43:28
But if you could think about anchoring right that moment, you say, "Ah, anchor. I know that's an issue."
43:32
But even that's not enough. You need one more thing.
43:34
You need to know what to do. Right?
43:35
So even if you think of the bias at the right time, you have to know what to do to correct it.
43:40
Because you're like, "Oh, anchoring. Okay, cool. Now, what do I do?"
43:42
Well, you could be like, "Oh, I can reanchor."
43:45
>> So, I'm going to create a new anchor to reanchor this conversation, right? Yeah.
43:49
>> So, it's like, you know, knowing what it is, thinking of it at the right moment and then knowing what to do about it.
43:54
So, that's what I would try to to evaluate this hypothetical person.
43:55
I would try to ask questions to understand situations they've been in when the theoretical knowledge actually got pulled up into their memory and then they actually what did they actually do with that knowledge to get a better outcome.
44:08
And um how many people do you think are fail at that task?
44:13
So when I was still at Beer Sterns, they asked me to interview a bunch of intern candidates.
44:22
Uh and they only asked me to do it once, and you're going to hear why.
44:24
Uh I didn't do any of the where do you see yourself in five years, any of that.
44:29
Um with with some I was a little obnoxious.
44:35
for example, to a math uh a person getting a master's degree in math.
44:38
I briefly chatted about why math was important on Wall Street and etc, etc.
44:47
And then I looked at them and I said, "Yeah, by the way, what's 17 and a half% of 72?" They fled the interview.
44:59
And and so uh that was maybe a little unkind of me.
45:02
Uh but the person I wanted to I ended I ended up recommending one candidate.
45:09
Um and he he was uh the guy who when I asked all candidates this by the way I would say okay so the S&P 500 is a capitalization weighted index that reinvests dividends.
45:25
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price weighted index that does not reinvest dividends.
45:34
Both started in the late 1920s.
45:34
Well, it's actually a proxy for the S&P, but the S&P 90 or 75.
45:38
Um, what do you think the Dow would be at today if it reinvested dividends?
45:47
>> And I didn't expect anyone to get the right answer, and the candidate I asked didn't get the right answer.
45:52
What I wanted to see was how was he going to go about solving this?
45:57
And so literally his response was, "May I have a calculator?
46:03
May I have some clean sheets of paper?
46:06
And can I ask you questions?"
46:06
And I'm like, "Yes, yes, and yes."
46:08
And then literally for about 25 minutes, he just worked it out.
46:13
What was the average dividend yield on the Dow between 1926 and I think this was in, you know, 2003.
46:22
uh told him and he came very very close.
46:25
So can you see interviews going that way as opposed to the trai because I I have a somewhat u and maybe it's wrong.
46:33
Uh I haven't tested it but I think that traditional interview questions actually subtract value because you're you're literally getting no information, right?
46:47
like what kind of answer are you going to give to where do you see yourself in five years and what's your biggest what's your biggest flaw?
46:53
I just care too much or I just work too hard.
46:55
Do do you think that there are other interview techniques that get much better results in terms of yeah that's signal that this person might be someone we might want to consider.
47:11
the great the great late uh Nobel Prizewinning scientist Den O Conaman did some really fascinating research on this uh 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
47:28
went and studied it doesn't really have much predictive power what it does do is it convinces the interviewer that they know who's a good candidate so that a lot of the questions asked make the cand they make the interviewer feel confident but they don't actually predict the thing that that we care about. And what
47:39
And what he discovered is that what you really want to do is think about all the traits you care about.
47:44
You want to design questions that are spec specifically trying to measure those traits, which it sounds like you were doing implicitly.
47:52
You're trying to what what am I really trying to get tell the person's good at and you're designing questions to try to get at those things.
47:56
You want to standardize them because what happens is if you create a lot of v if different people get different questions, you're injecting variance in your interview process. >> Exactly.
48:04
uh so you want to standardize them and then you want to evaluate the person on each of those individual questions designed to get a different traits and if you do that actually has much more predictive power.
48:13
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 we kind of there's now enough knowledge to say how to design them more effectively >> and the the I I'm assuming there are a lot of empirical uh tests that kind of point that way, right?
48:32
point that way, right? Yes, there's a there's a lot of research on you know what makes someone good for a job and it will be dependent on the job to some extent like for example if it's a salesperson a trait like extroversion is probably helpful and if it's a computer programmer extraversion probably doesn't help at all >> uh so so you do have to think about well
48:51
what are you hiring for >> right >> but uh but across a wide range of different types of jobs the personality trait of conscientiousness tends to be a good predictor of performance uh 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 like as close as possible to the actual job. Have them do it and then grade. It
49:10
Have them do it and then grade. It makes a lot of sense.
49:12
It's kind of a dumb idea in a way like 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 can't obviously 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?
49:27
A and what role do stereotypes which we all keep in our minds whether we realize it or not.
49:36
Uh other priors uh I you know I knew a person just like this and he turned out to be a real bad egg.
49:43
Uh, I is there any way to disambiguinate all of the internal biases you as the interviewer might have?
49:53
Um, and at least be aware or try to counteract them.
50:00
There are some really handy techniques.
50:03
For example, one that I like to use is you blind yourself the person's name during the eval when you're evaluing resumes and things like that.
50:08
Like that just just take the name off.
50:10
Why should you see the name?
50:12
the name is not going to, you know, help you figure out who is a better candidate.
50:15
But the problem with the name is it will give you a picture in your mind of who you're dealing with.
50:19
>> And sometimes you can actually find incredible candidates that but 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?
50:29
Um so so I think that's that's one.
50:32
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 like lumping people in a box, but also we tend to way overestimate how strong they are.
50:46
So take an example of men versus women.
50:48
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?
50:56
And the fascinating thing is we did find on average some differences in self-reported personality between men and women.
51:02
We also tested people whether they could predict them.
51:06
Do they know which ones men are higher and women higher?
51:08
And yes, they're pretty accurate.
51:09
I think about 80% of the time they were able to predict whether men or women were higher, right?
51:15
But people thought the effects were so much bigger than they are.
51:16
The reality is that men and women are these, you know, if you think about it as like bell curves, they're heavily overlapped, very, very heavily overlapped.
51:22
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
51:36
not stereotypically done by men >> and okay so we know about the problem what effective ways are there to combat that in an organization like mine right like I I love your uh the blind I I was uh involved with the Chamber of Music Society of Lincoln Center and for a while they did blind auditions. The
51:59
The musician would play behind the screen and I thought that uh the candidates selected ended up being significantly better >> uh because of that one intervention.
52:13
Um what other types of things would you recommend if we were hiring you as a consultant, right?
52:23
uh to to get people to run the process in a more advantageous because after all we're looking for predictions, right?
52:34
Is this person going to be good at the job? Yes or no?
52:36
Uh what other types of things would you advocate that we consider?
52:44
>> So, another technique I find useful is grading parts of a person's application process in the context of other applicants.
52:51
So, you know, you you imagine a spreadsheet or each row is a candidate, each column is something they did, like something they submitted or a work trial task or whatever. You could grade by row.
53:00
You go across that one person and look at everything they did.
53:04
And that's the natural way people want to do it.
53:05
But actually, it's often better to grade by column.
53:07
you say, "Okay, I'm going to compare everyone's work sample tests side by side and evaluate each of those."
53:13
Rather than instead of focusing on the person who submitted it, you're focusing on just well, how did a how did well did they do at this particular task relative to the other candidates?
53:24
>> That's a really good idea.
53:24
um given all the research you've done for the book and everything.
53:29
Uh so we give fellowships at OSV.
53:32
They're non-equity and if you're a builder and if you're a researcher obviously you get funds to do the research.
53:39
Uh is there any particular study that you would like oh finally it's going to get funded?
53:47
Uh and let's say it's for a six month to 12 month.
53:54
What kind of study would you design if the funding was appropriate?
53:59
>> So, we run a lot of research studies actually like right now we're running running one I'm really excited about on self-improvement >> where we're it's like a horse race.
54:06
We're actually pitting 20 different self-improvement techniques against each other. >> Oh, great.
54:09
>> And so each participant is going to be randomized to get four of the self-improvement techniques to do for a month. >> Okay.
54:14
>> And they're going to do them.
54:14
It will just take like about 12 minutes every every morning.
54:17
And then we're going to track and we're going to see what kind of outcomes on uh you know anxiety, depression, happiness, productivity, all these kinds of things.
54:25
Because these kinds of studies where you actually say, well, how well do different things work against each other?
54:30
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.
54:36
They can actually tell us like what works in practice.
54:39
What should you actually advise people to do?
54:40
So, I'm really excited about that kind of study.
54:42
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 >> to see you know because setting effective goals and useful goals is really really valuable but I've never
54:56
seen a study that says okay let's try different ways of helping people set goals and then we'll track people three months or six months or whatever and look at how well do they achieve them but also how satisfied are they with what they achieved and actually see like what's what's really effective for goal setting. Um, I'm It reminds me of what I
55:10
Um, I'm It reminds me of what I think is an apocryphal study.
55:14
They always claim that it was done at Yale or Princeton or Harvard, right?
55:18
It's always one of the Ivies and you'll you'll see them on the listicles on social media and and they say we tracked the class of and it's a class from, you know, 40 years ago.
55:31
And uh the one I'm most familiar with is 2% of them were at the top of their profession happily.
55:38
I mean, you know, they really laid it on.
55:42
>> Uh and what was the only difference between those people and everyone else in the class?
55:48
They all had written goals.
55:52
>> And so I I first discovered that I think when I was a teenager.
55:55
And I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to do written goals," which I did.
55:58
And it worked out actually pretty well.
56:00
But that that that isn't a you're the expert.
56:07
That isn't a real study, is it?
56:10
>> I've never heard of that study.
56:10
It sounds too good to be true.
56:11
You don't usually see those kind of effect sizes where just the 2% who succeeded all did the same thing.
56:16
>> That was all of my alarm bells were going off later when I revisited what I wrote about it when I was younger. >> Yeah.
56:23
And so they don't think that's true.
56:25
However, I do think it is really useful setting goals.
56:26
And I think a really common mistake people make is that they don't understand what we call in our book their guiding foundations.
56:36
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.
56:39
So you'll see a lot of young people set a goal that's fairly arbitrary.
56:41
Like I want to be a lawyer.
56:43
Well, why do you want to be a lawyer?
56:44
Well, because my, you know, parents seem to think it's like a good path for me or whatever.
56:49
Like they don't necessarily have a well articulated view on like why this is actually important to them based on what they fundamentally care about.
56:54
And so in the 12 levers, we spend uh 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 then build your goals on those on those getting foundations to help make sure they're moving you towards what you want.
57:11
It's 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.
57:18
I didn't have why did I do this?"
57:21
Like that is a common human experience and it's really disturbing. I I was lucky.
57:25
My grandfather was very successful entrepreneur and I was the youngest grandchild of the martini baby.
57:32
Uh thanks mom and dad for having those martinis.
57:34
But um he was the only grandparent I knew.
57:36
My others had died before I was born.
57:39
And so I got to spend a lot of time with him and he taught me this thing that he called premeditating.
57:46
And I use it to this very day.
57:46
I used it when I did the goals when I was reading that study.
57:51
Um, 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.
58:00
Um, what you do is you said, I want to be a lawyer.
58:04
And then you go down one side of the list.
58:09
You say all of the good things that I anticipate will happen if I am a lawyer, if I get to be a lawyer.
58:15
And then you also have another column of all of the bad things that might happen.
58:20
And you got got to try to get imaginative.
58:22
But then he also has you do you don't get to be you you you end up not graduating law school.
58:31
What are all the good things that might happen because you didn't graduate law school verse all of the and I found that it unlocks all sorts of things that you don't even know you're thinking about.
58:45
and and so it helps to calibrate so much better because you're also you know learning through negativia right on the I have found most of the really beneficial stuff that I surfaced when I do this comes on that side like I didn't get to be a lawyer but right um what do you think of that kind of idea?
59:08
Yeah, it sounds like a really useful technique and it reminds me of the premortem technique >> where you basically you're you're about to undertake on something, you set a goal, you're like, I'm going to go to 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.
59:25
I'm unhappy with the result.
59:25
Let's just suppose that's going to happen.
59:29
What do I predict the reason will be?
59:31
>> And you kind of write down the different reasons.
59:32
Well, maybe it's because once I get to graduate school, I won't get along with my adviser.
59:36
Or maybe it's like, you know, I try to get my PhD programs and kick into them or whatever.
59:41
You make a list of these kind of uh pre-predicted ways it's going to fail.
59:46
And then you can ask the question, okay, what can I do now to help plan events to prevent this this bad fate?
59:50
And is part of that um because you're just activating your recticular activating system and suddenly you know it's like when you buy a a new car and uh whereas before you've never seen any Volkswagen Beatles and right after you buy one all of a sudden all you see are Volkswagen.
1:00:13
Uh it has to do I think with attention you could correct me if I'm wrong about that.
1:00:18
Um 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 was and tried to guard against as much as I could when I was doing the test is what I call honestminded d honestminded data mining.
1:00:46
In other words, they are not intentionally trying to skew or P hack, but they end up doing that completely unconsciously.
1:00:55
Are there are there any methods that I mean after all you you you've just put a bunch of uh of systems through the ringer.
1:01:05
Are there any ways where you can say, "Ah, I think that the research here might need a redo."
1:01:11
research here might need a redo." 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 many studies were run that when researchers then tried to redo them say okay redo the studies from scratch they didn't get the same result and my best estimate is
1:01:34
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% I would say okay yeah there's There's going to be some of that that's expected, but 40% is is a really high rate and it makes it hard to build on science if 40% of the stuff is junk. How
1:01:50
How do you how do you build your castle on that kind of foundation? It's really hard.
1:01:55
Thankfully, there have been a bunch of efforts to try to improve it.
1:01:57
I think actually we still need a lot more work to to make it better.
1:02:00
work to to make it better. uh but we do see progress where p hacking where people do these kind of fishy statistical methods to get a result that's publishable that I think is it 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 using doing larger studies to combat it and so
1:02:21
we do see a lot of improvements where uh people are are really trying to do better research and I think that there's progress um but still there's a lot a lot more room for progress we have a project we called 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
1:02:41
And so unlike the project that was looking at the old research and saying, "Well, how was it?"
1:02:47
We're now looking at the research today, the best research coming out of the top journals and what and remarkably what we're seeing our initial signal is that we're seeing less of that kind of P hacking that gets you know statistically significant result that's 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.
1:03:04
We had to actually coin a name for it.
1:03:06
We call it importance hacking.
1:03:08
importance hacking. So it's an analog to p hacking and the way 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 right that's what everyone's trying to do but
1:03:22
that's really really hard right so some people they 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 that's one
1:03:35
thing they could do another thing they could do is p hack so they get a false positive that looks deal and that's what a lot of people were doing unfortunately knowingly or unknowingly you know 20 years ago but there's another method they can get in top journal and that's
1:03:46
what importance hacking this new idea which is they could manipulate the meaning of the result so that you 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
1:03:58
So if you were to redo the paper, you get the same result, but it doesn't mean what you think.
1:04:01
And because of that, it's actually much less interesting, much less important, and would not have been published had they not, you know, shifted the meaning of the result.
1:04:09
And so we're actually seeing quite a bit of that meaning shifting.
1:04:13
>> That's fascinating and I think a really smart uh measurement to look at.
1:04:15
Um what about the studies, right?
1:04:24
So, so right now uh I think large language models have advanced to a stage where they can do a lot of analysis without a lot of hallucination. Right?
1:04:34
I was reading a thing on my way in today uh 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.
1:04:51
I if if if a large language model did that with minimum hallucination, obviously guided by a human researcher, what do you think the results would be?
1:05:06
It's interesting because science is really one of the most powerful things humanity has ever invented. Totally agree.
1:05:10
We can we can discover incredible things.
1:05:12
We can make lasers and satellites and computer chips. Like it's it's wild.
1:05:15
At the same time, there's a lot of flaws in science.
1:05:17
And so my view is like we shouldn't pretend that science doesn't have those flaws, >> right?
1:05:24
>> 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, no, no. Science is incredible.
1:05:30
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?
1:05:38
We we humans have flaws and we bring them into the work, you know?
1:05:39
Uh there's P hacking, there's importance hacking, there's political bias sometimes in science.
1:05:44
So So there's there's all these things.
1:05:46
there's all these things. So I think if you if you had a really reliable way of checking like every scientific paper I think you would find an absolutely massive number of errors and yet still a bunch of areas of science still make progress they still are able to build
1:05:59
and it's sort of like if there too many errors and maybe that that sub field of science won't be able to prosper like my 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 a more robust science any way I can and to then help use that science to improve the world. So that's what I want
1:06:16
So that's what I want to do.
1:06:17
I think psychology has tremendous potential.
1:06:19
I think it hasn't really fully lived up to that.
1:06:20
There's some really really great work in psychology, but I think there could be way more with improved methods, better technology, uh better priorization around what topics are studied.
1:06:30
Um so yeah, I'm really stoked about science even though I I see it as very very flawed. >> Yeah.
1:06:35
And we share that view entirely.
1:06:35
I tried to write uh the book I'm best known for, what works on Wall Street, following the scientific method.
1:06:42
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. >> Great.
1:06:56
>> Um but um I'm also somewhat troubled by this kind of bifurcation.
1:07:03
We're talking about the scientific method, right?
1:07:05
Which is you have a hypothesis, you run the tests and then you get your results, right?
1:07:10
uh Fineman was was famous for saying no matter how beautiful your theory, if the test does not uh indicate that it's correct, the test is right, your theory is wrong.
1:07:21
Um and one of the things that troubles me is you have this kind of breakoff branch which I guess is called scientism, right?
1:07:33
You must believe the science.
1:07:37
Anyone who tells me the science is settled immediately I think you don't really understand the scientific method because it's like never really settled it. Yeah, of course.
1:07:47
Some of the the best laws you can continue to test and you're going to continue to replicate and get the Well, but what do you think?
1:07:57
How do how does one combat that?
1:07:57
Because as you say, the the anti-science crowd is the crowd that terrifies me, right?
1:08:04
because like it is responsible for virtually our entire modern life, right?
1:08:10
When we discovered, you know, the age of reason and the enlightenment, etc.
1:08:15
Um, how would you go about dissuading someone that, you know, maybe just a friend who doesn't have his advanced degrees, etc.
1:08:28
What would be your pitch to to be like, "Yeah, no, no.
1:08:31
We science is not always right.
1:08:35
In fact, it it builds in this method to prove that it's not always right.
1:08:41
Any any other tips for talking to people like that?"
1:08:44
Yeah, I share that that frustration because yes, on the one hand that the science deniers that they're, you know, causing lots of problems in society by ignoring what's actually true, but then the the scientist uh the the like rah raw science folks that are like, "No, no, no.
1:08:59
Science is right about everything."
1:09:01
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, right? Like, listen to them.
1:09:13
They're not full of they're talking about their own field and they and they pay the big price, you know, to to accept that, right?
1:09:17
So, yes, we have to admit that the science can go off the rails.
1:09:21
It's a it's a human process.
1:09:21
It's fascinating because there's certain scientific questions which almost certainly will never be overturned, right?
1:09:29
Whether, you know, it's like it's answered to a degree of certainty. It's like very unlikely.
1:09:32
However, there can be subtlety around it that could get overturned.
1:09:37
>> Like with quantum mechanics, certain aspects of quantum mechanics, we've just proven them.
1:09:40
So not myself, I'm mathematical, but they've been proven with such level of rigor, you're like, there's no way that's ever going to get overturned.
1:09:46
But our interpretation of it could completely change, right?
1:09:50
>> Much the same way where when Newtonian mechanics was the was the king, people thought, oh, we live in a clockwork universe and there's determinism.
1:09:56
And then quantum mechanics, which agrees to Newtonian mechanics to a very high degree of accuracy in most situations, is like, no, no, no.
1:10:03
You've been completely misunderstanding everything.
1:10:07
So certainly that could happen. We can't rule that out.
1:10:09
You know, maybe a new theory of physics comes along and said, "We're looking at quantum theory the wrong way."
1:10:13
Yeah, it's really accurate, but it's only an approximation of an even deeper theory and even deeper theory could have a different philosophy of what's real.
1:10:19
Uh so I think that we need to remember that could always get overturned.
1:10:24
But there are certain experiments that yeah, they've been done so many times with so many people and so many different varieties.
1:10:28
There's no way they're going to get overturned at this point.
1:10:31
And and do you distinguish between the hard sciences of quantum mechanics, physics, mathematics, etc.
1:10:40
where you can at least sort of think, yeah, that that result is very well proven.
1:10:46
It reminds me of the old joke about the two bankers talking to one another and uh the one says to the other, well, we know it works in practice.
1:10:55
The problem is, will it work in theory?
1:11:00
But um and and like psychology um I love by the way that your work because you are trying to bring rigor and and empirical results and everything to it.
1:11:14
Um but is there some sort of trait?
1:11:18
is there some sort of trait? I mean what about things where there is no like the the result of the experiment is always going to be indeterminate right how do how do you deal with that when you're doing psych like that one person who who just was in the study but like a complete outlier do you normalize do you
1:11:41
winsorize what do you do so in some ways studying physics is harder than studying humans you might need to get all the incredibly precise machines that measure things at the you know a millionth of an inch precision or whatever or you know giant particle colliders but in other ways studying physics is easier than studying humans. every human on earth
1:11:58
studying humans. every human on earth has ever lived has been different from every other right there is no you know every particle is the same if you make humanity right uh culture changes and and things that we think are fundamentally humans it's like oh whoops that was actually just culture and like you could actually have a totally
1:12:12
different culture and 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 said take we took it thousands of different things that have been measured humans and we said just pick two of them at random what's their correlation and on average the magnitude of correlation is about 0.1. So in other words like almost 1.
1:12:30
So in other words like almost any two random things you pick >> they have some correlation typically it's not zero and that means that there's this incredible morass of everything is related to everything and trying to like 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.
1:12:48
of messy world we live in. uh you know take take an example of like childhood poverty right well childhood poverty it 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 a hope uh it could increase also future income
1:13:07
because starting in poverty makes it more difficult so you start to see how everything kind of become connected everything else right you take one variable and it's like oh it's disconnected in this web so um so it's really hard that being said I'm optimistic that I think with better technology, better methodology, uh, and and better prioration, I really think that we can make more progress in psychology. I don't think it's I don't
1:13:26
I don't think it's I don't think we're limited just by the difficulty of the field.
1:13:28
I think there's much more we can do to do better.
1:13:31
>> And, uh, back to the book, if if if you were going to just say, "Hey, well, you're gonna because I'm going to ask you to do it.
1:13:39
Read my book because >> Yeah. >> Give me your pitch." >> Totally.
1:13:44
Well, first of all, I just want to give a shout out to my co-author, Jeremy Stevenson. Yeah.
1:13:47
So he's a he's a psychologist. He treats patients.
1:13:49
He also has a PhD in psychology.
1:13:50
So shout giant shout out to him.
1:13:52
So, I'll I'll tell you why we set out to write this book and 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, "Ah, was that really worth reading?"
1:14:12
Or, "Oh, man, I waited through all of the stories and the only thing I got was these like two ideas."
1:14:16
And so, we both felt there's so much good stuff and also it can be so frustrating, so confusing.
1:14:20
We kept seeing the same ideas with different names and not realizing oh is that really the same thing or not.
1:14:25
So both of us were really inspired by this idea of like could we write a book that 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.
1:14:34
But I don't think it's a replacement for the whole self-improvement literature.
1:14:38
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 find out how to deep dive in any one of those levers.
1:14:50
So, we have tons of resources.
1:14:51
If you're like, "Oh, lever seven, that's awesome.
1:14:53
That's really helping me."
1:14:53
We give you really concrete steps you can take.
1:14:56
But then we also say, "And if you want to go really deep, here's some great researchers to go really deep on just that lever."
1:15:01
>> And we just uh mentioned that all humans are different, right?
1:15:05
Um, and do you think that there's any validity to the idea that something one of the levers is going to like just perfectly fit me like a glove?
1:15:18
Whereas if you tried it, it was going to be a disaster.
1:15:20
Like what do you walk me through how somebody who reads the book, how do they figure?
1:15:27
Because one of the things again, confirmation bias, right?
1:15:33
You're going to see something that you already believe and you're going to say, "Oh, okay.
1:15:37
I I'm going to do more of that."
1:15:39
When what they really need is more of the thing that isn't confirming their biases.
1:15:47
So I've run over a hundred studies on human psychology and people sometimes ask me what's your biggest takeaway one thing if you could point to and so I thought a bunch about that and I realized my one biggest takeaway of all of it is that our human minds are incredibly different from each other much more different than we realize like
1:16:02
when we're sitting in front of another person most people behave kind of similarly and we don't fully recognize that the other person could be having a completely different experience um 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
1:16:18
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 lovers not one lover is like yeah different things are going to help for different people for me some of the stuff around uh we call it approaching
1:16:33
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 different lover totally you know will be much more useful for you um you know some people are overactive. They they've booked
1:16:46
They they've booked their whole schedule absolutely the maximum capacity and other people are underactive.
1:16:52
They, you know, they're just sitting around most of the day doing nothing.
1:16:54
And those two people are going to need different things.
1:16:56
So, um, 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.
1:17:02
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.
1:17:08
And and what has been the feedback?
1:17:11
Have have people come to you and said, you know, I gave it a shot and uh I did it for x number of months and you know, my results were disastrous and you know why is that?
1:17:24
Uh or are people not not commu over overcommunicating?
1:17:32
>> Well, uh we do make it clear you might need to try, you know, two or three lovers to get you the results.
1:17:36
I really think that if you put in the effort, you pick a few that are relevant to you and you try them.
1:17:40
I do think most people will really see benefits.
1:17:42
But thankfully, we've been seeing on our reviews that we've been getting on Amazon and good read just review after review where people are saying, "Oh, this really helped me uh that this changed my life."
1:17:51
Which is awesome and wonderful, but you also shouldn't take that too seriously because you can also feel here you can also find people raving about how they drank their own piss and it improved their life.
1:17:59
So, but it is very it is very nice to hear.
1:18:05
We love to hear we love to hear those kinds of stories. Yeah.
1:18:08
Skip the uh I hope that's not one of the levers.
1:18:12
>> Yeah, it's definitely not >> the 13th lever. It's the 13th.
1:18:18
It's not one of the levers, but um do not drink your own piss. Yeah.
1:18:20
You use that as an example uh in >> well-known people giving advice and then you went and said, "What was the advice?" >> Yeah.
1:18:29
There's this thing that's so frustrating where and I think we're all kind of at least somewhat susceptible to it where we see someone who seems credible.
1:18:37
Maybe it's a 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 really a temptation but oh wow that like changed their life I should try that thing. >> Yeah.
1:18:47
>> And so I really just wanted to combat that.
1:18:49
So I was like I'm going to find the funniest examples of people being great >> of people being like this revolutionized my life.
1:18:56
Everyone needs to try this.
1:18:56
And then you're like wait what did the person do?
1:18:58
And there's literally 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.
1:19:06
So, um, do you think people really want to change?
1:19:12
>> I think that people want to change, but they're often afraid of giving up something, >> right?
1:19:17
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.
1:19:23
It's such a waste of time. Right?
1:19:25
But there's a reason you're doing it, right?
1:19:27
It's like not like you're doing it for no reason.
1:19:29
So, it's useful to think about what are you getting out of that, right?
1:19:31
there probably is some benefit to you.
1:19:33
probably is some benefit to you. or even um more serious stuff like maybe you you know haven't pursued a relationship and it's been years and years and years and you always thought I want to be married but you you know you never really meet anyone right like that the your lack of like attempting to date is probably
1:19:48
doing something for you maybe it's protecting yourself in some way or you know avoiding rejection whatever it is very often our harmful behaviors do give us something that we value >> and so it's useful to understand that recognize 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
1:20:04
But it's worth acknowledging that we often have fear of change because there's something we're getting out of not changing. >> Yeah.
1:20:12
And when I was reviewing your other podcasts and things you've written, you also touch on mindbody. Uh I'm big on that. I'm a big fan of Dr.
1:20:21
John Sarno who practiced here at NYU.
1:20:26
>> Um >> you did a lot of like neuroplastic pain research. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:20:29
And uh basically what what he concluded was that a lot of uh physical problems are actually mind in origin.
1:20:41
And his thesis was essentially a as a society.
1:20:45
Many of us believe that certain emotions are unacceptable to display and so we repress them and according to Sarno uh our body does not like that and it compensates for that by giving you a physical symptom. Right?
1:21:05
And he found that only people who were open to the idea that their mind could somehow be involved uh were the ones that his curate was ridiculous. Right?
1:21:16
There's a movie that I helped finance called All the Rage. Um and it's about Dr.
1:21:21
Sarno and some of the people in it.
1:21:25
I mean, honestly, they're in wheelchairs and then the last bit shows them running in Central Park.
1:21:32
Central Park. um and it seems miraculous but he himself was always saying this is not miraculous this this is a well-known function and he he started doing it because he was trained as an MD and he wasn't getting any results for the
1:21:51
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
1:22:06
It might not be the best benefit in the world, but he he said that he he phrased when when people did all of his homework and all of that and still didn't get better, he made them make a list of what potential secondary benefits of you having, you know, your ar you being unable to move your arm or get up off the couch.
1:22:29
And in that he found a lot of unlocks.
1:22:32
So 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."
1:22:48
How do you how do you go about like figuring that out in in your own studies?
1:22:56
Yeah, it's such an interesting topic and it's actually one I've been I've been working on an essay for a while about exactly this topic of um illness that's connected to our psychology.
1:23:06
>> I think we have to be very careful because let's say that someone uh can't walk because of a back injury, right?
1:23:11
They got a back injury, now they can't walk.
1:23:12
There will be some subset of them that just need surgery or like there's some mechanical problem >> and then there'll be some subset of them where none of the surgeries help.
1:23:20
You know, basic doctors have nothing that that benefits them. >> Yeah.
1:23:25
And fascinatingly, some fraction of that subset might actually benefit from these psychological ideas and might discover actually learning to not resist the pain, learn to not fear the pain that they feel uh actually unlocks something and suddenly they're getting more mobility back and suddenly they're they're completely better.
1:23:42
And this is this is a real phenomenon.
1:23:44
But I do want to be careful because I do think it we have to be careful about subopuls because there are sub populations where I think the better model of what's going on is like some real physical, you know, malady >> by by the way. Yeah. in all of his work.
1:23:56
That's what that's where he starts. >> Exactly.
1:23:58
And you kind of have to narrow down the group and say, "Okay, we've eliminated this. We've eliminated this. We've eliminated this.
1:24:02
Now we're down to this group where we've ruled out sort of all the physical things.
1:24:06
Now let's explore the psychological."
1:24:07
I think also people often in that group can, and I really empathize with this, they can feel like they're being told, "Oh, it's just in your head or you're crazy or something like this."
1:24:16
And so I think it's also worth emphasizing that that kind of pain is just as real as any other pain.
1:24:21
like you experience it exactly like you experience any other pain.
1:24:24
Does it feel any different? It's just a question.
1:24:26
Are there psychological unlocks that can reduce the pain?
1:24:28
And the answer is sometimes yes.
1:24:30
And it's it's really really interesting about how these feedback loops can can actually kind of sometimes maybe propagate signals.
1:24:37
Um and I think one way that that can happen is someone can have a mental health challenge.
1:24:41
Let's say severe anxiety and they're feeling anxious just you know most of every day, right?
1:24:46
Maybe they had a really uh really traumatic experience.
1:24:48
It gave them PTSD and now they're just living with constant anxiety.
1:24:51
Well, anxiety leads to muscle tension naturally most likely because it kind of creates a you want to when when something uh scary is happening, you want to run away or fight.
1:25:01
So, you're kind of tense. Yeah.
1:25:02
>> But now, think about the effects of tensing all day long every day.
1:25:05
>> Like, oh yeah, you start having back pain.
1:25:06
You start having neck pain.
1:25:06
And then let's suppose now you go and you think of it as like, oh, I have a physical problem now.
1:25:12
You're like, I should baby my back.
1:25:15
I should, you know, I should not do anything that tweaks my neck.
1:25:18
And so now you're reducing your mobility.
1:25:19
And then, you know, three years go by and you're now in this really restricted range of motion.
1:25:23
And guess what happens when you restrict your range of movement?
1:25:25
Then you start getting stiffness and soreness and you're like, "Ah, it's getting worse."
1:25:30
And it can completely spiral out of control.
1:25:32
And for that person, the mental health thing might sit at the top of their this whole chain of problems. >> Yeah.
1:25:38
And that that is a classic example of negative compounding, right?
1:25:41
be the you start with, oh, I'm gonna baby this and then, well, if I move this way, it doesn't hurt.
1:25:50
Or if I sit this particular way, it doesn't hurt.
1:25:52
And then all of that just feeds all of the rest of it, and you get to a kind of a mental prison where it it nothing is is helping.
1:26:04
I think uh one of the things that I would love to do and 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 ameliate some of the problems to this because I I think that you mentioned it.
1:26:27
It's like whenever you say, "Well, maybe this is in your mind."
1:26:32
That drives a lot of people really crazy because as as you mentioned and Sarno confirms the pain that you're feeling is very real.
1:26:40
That is not your you know that is real.
1:26:44
In fact, uh, a a woman who died far too young and was a researcher in this, uh, from the from the medical side, Candace Per wrote, uh, a book called Molecules of Emotion in which she said it can actually start a chain reaction of things like neuropeptides, etc. flooding your system.
1:27:04
So the thing has a mental origin but has very real physical characteristics that re enforce that idea.
1:27:16
Um I I'm interested in what what uh what is the thesis of the paper that you're working on with this uh particular problem? >> Yes.
1:27:28
So the the essay I'm writing the goal is to try to categ um physical challenges that are that can be caused or solved by psychological solutions.
1:27:40
So we have these words like psychossematic right >> and if actually if psychosmatic as it's often used just means a disorder like a medical disorder that is influenced by psychological factors.
1:27:52
If you define it that way, it's really kind of a good coast because you'd be like, well, yeah, a lot of them, like maybe more than half, maybe most are influenced by psychology, right?
1:28:00
You know, people get flare-ups when they're stressed or >> they might have more trouble recovering if they're, you know, if they're anxious or whatever, >> dry mouth if they're afraid of speaking. >> Yeah, exactly.
1:28:09
So, it's it's a so it's it's not quite the right word.
1:28:11
Um, and then we also have this idea of psychoggenic illness, which are illnesses that are caused by psychological factors.
1:28:18
But the thing I'm most interested in is actually there, as far as I know, there is no term for it.
1:28:24
So I think of it as um disorders that could be solved psychologically, either solved or or very substantially improved psychologically.
1:28:31
And there isn't really a term for that.
1:28:32
So that's why 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 you know, what do we make of this?
1:28:41
because I think right now today there's a there's a shockingly large number of people that have uh pain that I think could be substantially improved psychologically. >> Yeah.
1:28:51
Um well I look forward to reading that paper because uh the the my Sarno experience was when I was 37 I got a frozen neck and I literally couldn't move my neck beyond that.
1:29:03
And so I went to the doctors as usual.
1:29:05
I went to the orthopedic guys and they put me in traction and we were at a bookstore.
1:29:10
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.
1:29:20
Uh but the deal was you can also buy as many books as you want but you got to read them anyway.
1:29:24
So I one of my younger children was heming and hawing and couldn't decide on what she wanted to buy.
1:29:33
And so I wandered over to the medical section and I was like looking for stuff on what do I do for a stiff neck.
1:29:39
That's where I found Sarno and and I'm like, "Well, this seems interesting."
1:29:45
Because when you look at his bio, he's an MD. He's working at NYU.
1:29:49
Uh and so I bought the book and I read it and the first time I read it, I literally threw it across the room.
1:29:59
>> You're like, "Ah, there's no way it was bullshit."
1:30:01
>> My wife is like, "What? Why' you do that?"
1:30:03
I went, "That is the biggest pile of horseshit I have ever read in my life.
1:30:09
I can't believe that NYU is letting one of their doctors publish this bullshit."
1:30:14
She picks it up and starts looking through it and they describe personality types and things like that.
1:30:20
She goes, "I suggest you read it again." I did.
1:30:26
I ended up reading it like six times.
1:30:29
And by the sixth time, I'm like seeing myself on every page.
1:30:32
But the thing was, and this was the hope for outcome, but I wasn't I mean, my neck still wasn't moving.
1:30:41
After that sixth read, I woke up, hadn't done anything different, and completely gone. It's fascinating.
1:30:47
I literally just a few days ago heard about I was talking to a pain researcher and he was telling me about one of the people that 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've had for years just went away. Yeah.
1:31:07
Now that's not the common case.
1:31:08
That's that's the weird outlier.
1:31:09
But like it occasionally happens.
1:31:11
It's almost like the brain can just suddenly be like, "Oh, wait a minute.
1:31:14
I don't have to have pain now." Okay.
1:31:16
Now, unfortunately, usually it's a lot more work than that, >> right? Yeah.
1:31:20
Unfortunat also talks about those and he also underlines these are outliers, but he has several patients who literally just he would do lectures.
1:31:32
Um, and that was a required part of his therapy.
1:31:35
Um, and he talks about the rare individual who came to the first lecture, listened, and then like I'm good. I was ready.
1:31:44
Well, we know I think phantom limb syndrome is such a perfect example here because it's this phenomena 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.
1:31:57
Like they might feel like their fist is still clenched in a really painful way. >> Yeah.
1:32:01
>> And they can't get rid of it.
1:32:01
And this uh wonderful neuroscientist developed this strategy to help them which is a a mirror box where they basically through a contraption of mirrors they put their their uh 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. >> Wow. and the pain goes away.
1:32:26
And you know, it sometimes just cures them essentially immediately.
1:32:29
And what I think it shows is that the brain is doing a lot of processing of information somehow after the the arm is removed the 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 and it just get but by seeing the arm again and seeing the fist unclenched the brain just like oh I can reinterpret the signal now and suddenly the interpretation shifts.
1:32:49
So I got it's a great proof of concept.
1:32:51
It's not the same thing, but it's a proof of concept that sometimes the brain could just reinterpret a pain signal almost instantaneously. >> Yeah.
1:33:00
And kind of perception is reality, right?
1:33:04
>> Well, pain is it's just what you experience, right?
1:33:05
The problem with pain is that it it it feels bad and if it felt different than you know, we would call it something else.
1:33:13
>> So, what what's the future do you think for your work and the work of others?
1:33:19
Uh, are we going to be able to get to a place where we can provide the levers and and materially help people who want to change?
1:33:28
We talked earlier about some people say they want to change but don't really want to change.
1:33:33
But those who really want to change, what do you think? >> Yeah.
1:33:38
So, I mean, we wrote this book to try to make it easier, but I think technology can really help here as well.
1:33:43
Uh for people that uh buy the book on our website uh 12 loversbook.
1:33:45
com we have a little AI bot you get cool that you can access that just helps you apply the techniques from the books.
1:33:51
So it just is like a little assistant.
1:33:52
It's not a therapist but it can help you apply the techniques from the book.
1:33:54
And I think we're I think technology actually is a lot that it can help with both in helping people put things into action and also helping helping improve the science.
1:34:03
Like technology can actually help us do better science on humans.
1:34:05
in terms of the application of it, you know, I don't think we're at the point where everyone should be, you know, using AI as a therapist, but I do think that it can be like an assistive tool for your self-improvement journey.
1:34:17
So, I have a thesis that um AI might actually ultimately be a better therapist.
1:34:23
And and the reason I think that is again back to human nature, there are a lot of things that could be deep.
1:34:32
things that could be deep. You could perceive that you have a belief that you treat as a very deep dark secret and you you're not even willing to share that with your human therapists because of all the reasons right embarrassment or you know what are they going to think of
1:34:52
me now etc 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 syncapanti and all of that goes away. What do you think about that idea?
1:35:10
What do you think about that idea?
1:35:12
>> Yeah, I think the out of the box standard models people use today like chachi and claude.
1:35:16
I think if you say okay, be my therapist.
1:35:19
I think there's a lot of problems with that.
1:35:22
>> You know, sick event is a huge problem.
1:35:24
A good therapist will not reinforce your false perceptions.
1:35:28
>> They won't necessarily just immediately say, "Oh, you're wrong."
1:35:29
They'll probably do it more delicately, but they will not reinforce your your false perceptions.
1:35:33
But AIS will absolutely reinforce your your false perceptions.
1:35:37
And if you are the sort of per let's suppose that you are ruining your relationships but blaming on other people, the AI will absolutely buy into that and convince you that it's all everyone else's fault.
1:35:47
>> It really was her fault. >> Exactly.
1:35:48
And I've seen people use it this way and it's very disturbing.
1:35:52
That's the kind of thing that with better technology and the right training, maybe they can improve that and make it better.
1:35:55
Like I think they probably can improve that.
1:35:57
So I think right now we do have to be careful.
1:35:58
One day, yeah, the technology probably will get better and better for this this kind of work.
1:36:03
And as you point out, there are benefits, too.
1:36:05
People may not feel comfortable sharing with a therapist.
1:36:06
On the other hand, they also may not feel comfortable giving to some giant company who owns their their deepest, darkest secrets.
1:36:13
So there's trade-offs here.
1:36:13
And what are they going to do with it?
1:36:15
And what's the privacy on that?
1:36:16
Um, I think also there's other things like for some things actually having a human be there actually is really important as as a social species.
1:36:25
Like 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, you know, like that just may not, you know, that we are humans after all, right?
1:36:38
I uh what one of the things that I I've written four non-fiction books all about the market.
1:36:44
Uh I'm I'm taking my crack at my first non-fiction book, my first fiction book, sorry.
1:36:49
Um, and one of the best uh prompts that I ever wrote, uh, AI is is very good at crit being critical if you tell it to be. >> Absolutely.
1:37:05
>> So, I wrote a prompt saying that this is the most intelligent, most ariodite, most insightful reviewer of this genre of fiction.
1:37:14
And he absolutely hates every chapter of our book. funny.
1:37:21
>> And literally the feedback I got from that model saved me so many dumb things that I was putting in to the book.
1:37:29
Um, and now I'm not advocating that for a for a psychological therapist, but um, most people don't have as thick of skin or they're willing to be absolutely blasted by the you know, one of the things that I really thought about was my wife graduated magna or sumakum laad in journalism.
1:37:49
She's a great editor and when I wrote my first book, she edited it.
1:37:53
And boy, did that cause some rocky times in our relationship because we were still doing everything on paper back then.
1:38:02
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.
1:38:11
I would be legitimately upset and I would blame her, right?
1:38:13
you uh you just have no sense for any kind of beauty and elegance and writing and but but the point was we got in a real fight and obviously end of story.
1:38:27
She was of course completely right and all of her changes were adopted and and whatnot.
1:38:36
But I use that example to myself thinking like I'm not going to get mad at an AI, right?
1:38:43
And so I could take all and it boy it was really I mean it was downright mean.
1:38:51
Did it hurt a little bit? Did you feel? >> No.
1:38:55
When I when I first read the first one I was kind of like oh my god.
1:39:00
>> But then I thought okay if a person said that to me I'd be really really upset.
1:39:08
But then I just was like this is an autocomplete.
1:39:10
and and so the ideas that it says are actually are and I really need to redo them, rethink them.
1:39:21
>> I think a lot of people could benefit from editing the permanent custom instructions.
1:39:24
So, you know, with Claude and CHBD, there's like you can put in whatever you want in the moment, but you can also set permanent custom instructions always there.
1:39:33
>> And I found a lot of value from that.
1:39:35
One thing I tell it is that whenever something is like is disputed to 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.
1:39:47
Another is putting in the customs instruction to say that you value the truth more than finding out that you're right.
1:39:54
I had that >> and and always be you know be brutally honest about the truth and it actually makes a difference. >> Huge. Yeah.
1:40:00
Um, well, you are so much fun to talk to.
1:40:04
I'm I'm looking at my watch here.
1:40:06
Uh, what of the 12 lovers, which one surprised you the most?
1:40:16
One of the biggest surprises to me was you you think that you understand your problems in your life.
1:40:21
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 that actually holds us back.
1:40:31
And I don't mean the challenges you had once and you solved that.
1:40:34
I mean the kind of recurring challenges that we face very often we have less understanding of them than we think.
1:40:40
>> Um so an example simple example would be like let's suppose you're getting in a fight with your partner.
1:40:45
You might you might think oh I understand why we're getting in fights like I want one thing she wants a different thing.
1:40:50
And that is a level of understanding.
1:40:53
But then you might think to yourself, well, but other couples I know, they have the same situation. They want one thing.
1:40:58
One one of them wants one thing, the other wants the other thing.
1:41:00
And yet they're not fighting about it.
1:41:02
They seem to be able to resolve it.
1:41:03
So that's the second level of understanding is, well, why are we actually not able to resolve it?
1:41:06
And maybe it's because when you bring it up, you start to feel annoyed and she starts to feel annoyed, right? Okay.
1:41:11
That leads to a third level of understanding.
1:41:13
Well, why is it that you're both getting annoyed in a situation?
1:41:16
And so I think um 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 um solutions and better understanding leads to better solutions.
1:41:35
So that is actually to me I was surprised about the power of that really simple idea of of going deeper and going deeper and how often we fail to do that. >> Yeah.
1:41:44
And that ties in with all those other cultural norms, social norms, and and whatnot.
1:41:50
And I found that very instructive as well.
1:41:53
It's like if you can, and staying with your example, if if you can convince your partner, hey, I just read this great book.
1:42:01
We keep fighting about this.
1:42:04
Let's talk a little bit more about it.
1:42:06
Like, why do you get pissed? Here's why I get pissed. Yeah. Like going meta.
1:42:12
It's sort of like we were talking about constructive disagreement earlier that if you're if you're trying to like win the argument or convince the other person you're right, that's probably what you've been doing all that time. Yeah.
1:42:22
If you flip to the meta and say, "Hey, why don't we have a discussion about why is that we don't resolve this?"
1:42:26
Like what's on the meta level? What's going on?
1:42:28
Like imagine we're aliens like looking at the situation, what would we observe?
1:42:30
You know, sometimes that can be more productive and to give you a lot more insight.
1:42:35
I uh I tried that years and years and years ago with my wife and I I presented it as uh what would a disinterested observer sitting here listening to us think about what we're talking about? >> Yeah.
1:42:51
>> And she goes, "Is he your disinterested?"
1:42:56
>> And so I immediately went, "There are two disinterested observers."
1:43:02
uh and and that is kind of a variation of this and that's also pretty helpful like I it's why in certain polling uh innovations that I think are interesting because they get the prediction better um instead of asking somebody you know who are you going to vote for in the midterms they say who do you think your neighbor is going to vote for in the midterms and those have actually proven to be far better predictions of the actual outcome.
1:43:31
Well, Spencer, this has been so much fun.
1:43:34
I was really looking forward to it. I I love your work.
1:43:36
I think the kudos for being willing to readund How many was it? 106.
1:43:44
>> We went through Yeah, it was over 100. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:43:47
>> Uh that must have been trying particularly with some of them.
1:43:50
Um if you know the show, our our final question uh is we're going to make you emperor of the world just for a day. Two things you can't do.
1:44:01
You can't kill anyone and you can't put anybody in a re-education camp.
1:44:06
But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone.
1:44:10
You can say two things into it and the two things you say are going to incept the entire population of the world.
1:44:18
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."
1:44:25
And unlike all the other times, I'm gonna actually act on these two ideas.
1:44:30
What are you gonna accept into the world? >> Yeah.
1:44:34
So, I think the first would be that in order to figure out the truth, you have to use methods that reliably create truth.
1:44:42
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.
1:44:51
If you believe what your family tells you, you're going to believe what your family tells you.
1:44:54
And so if you think about the methods we use to arrive at the truth and we say would I endorse that?
1:45:00
Would I endorse everyone using that method of figuring out the truth and listening to charismatic people or trusting whatever your family says is it's obviously not a reliable method in general.
1:45:08
So it also shouldn't be the way that you try to figure out truth.
1:45:11
You need more and so trying to think of I would try to get everyone to think about well what are the methods actually reliably lead to truth.
1:45:17
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 randomize people, give it to a bunch of them, and don't give it to another group and then compare. Right?
1:45:31
>> Every other method is pretty much worse than that.
1:45:33
And um and I think if if everyone understood that of why we need methods like that and why we need to check what it says before we go and believe things that I think we would have a better world.
1:45:42
Um so that would be my first one.
1:45:44
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 on a you know on an individual level but I think it actually really applies as a societal level.
1:46:00
>> 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.
1:46:09
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 multiffactorial, 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.
1:46:28
So that would be the other one. >> Both are great.
1:46:31
I think they would improve the world immeasurably as will your book.
1:46:35
Spencer, thank you so much for joining me on Infinite Loops.
1:46:38
Thanks so much for having me on.