Modern Wisdom - #705 - Spencer Greenberg - The 5 Most Effective Techniques To Hack Your Habits

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

Spencer Greenberg is a mathematician, a writer and the founder of ClearerThinking.org First we make our habits, and then our habits make us. But what is the best way to step into this recursive loop and take charge of the most powerful force in our lives? Thankfully Spencer just completed a huge new study testing tons of different techniques. Expect to learn how useful personality tests are, Spencer’s biggest insights from 450 people trying every habit strategy ever invented, how you can better integrate your subconscious into decision making, why becoming wise is genuinely important, how useful intuition really is, when you should trust your gut and when you should override it and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM)  Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Spencer Greenberg, he's a mathematician, a writer, and the founder of clearerthinking.org. First, we make our habits, and then our habits make us. But what is the best way to step into this recursive loop and take charge of the most powerful force in our lives? Thankfully, Spencer just completed a huge new study testing tons of different techniques. Expect to learn how useful personality tests are, spends as biggest insights from 450 people trying every habit strategy ever invented.

How you can better integrate your subconscious into decision-making, why becoming wise is genuinely important, how useful intuition really is when you should trust your gut and when you should override it. And much more. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. The best gymware on the planet is from Gymshark, so no matter what you are looking for, if you are spending more time in the gym, you will feel better if you've got cool new clothing. And Gymshark make the best men's shorts on the planet. They're studio shorts in Dusty Maroon, Willow Green, Onyx Gray, and Navy

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plus a free box with your first purchase. If you go to HouseOfMacadamians.com, slash Modern Wisdom and use the code MW20, a checkout that's HouseOfMacadamians.com, slash Modern Wis, please welcome Spencer Greenberg. How useful are personality tests in your opinion? Ah, that is a great question. So we've just run a really big study on this. I'm super excited about it. In fact, this is the first time I've ever talking about it.

So hot off the presses. So the most popular percent of the test in the world seems to be the Myers-Brigs test. But the Myers-Brigs test, also called the MBTI, is a commercial? So it's hard to study because it's owned by a company and so on. So what we did is we took the public information about the constructs that have been known about what it's trying to measure, and we designed our own test design to measure those same constructs. I'll just call it a young test because it's not exactly precise the same as the commercial one, but it's designed to measure their similar ideas. Then we actually put it to the test.

The way that we did this is we also developed what's called a big five test. Are you familiar with the big five personality model? Yes. These are interesting because the big five personality model is the one used by academics. The one they call the gold standard. Whereas the Myers-Briggs is the one that's like super popular for the lay people, and often, you know, academics can put food and say,

oh, that's not so great, right? And so we wanted to put them against each other. And so the way we did this is we took a whole bunch of facts about a person's life. It was about 42 different facts. So everything from how satisfied they are with their life, to how many friends they have, you know, to things like, you know,

how they've been arrested and so on. And then we had them take both of these tests, our big five tests, Gold Standard Academic One, and this young Indian test is I know after the Myers-Briggs, and said, well, how well can each test predict what's true about people's lives as a measure of how good they are? So do you want to guess what happened when we did this? And I'll just, before I have you guess, I'll just throw in one third thing. We also used astrological sun signs as a measure of how good they are. So, do you want to guess what happened when we did this? And I'll just, before I have you guess, I'll just throw in one third thing. We also used astrological sunsines as a control group. So we took people, you know, Zodiac sign, are you a Pisces or an Ares or whatever,

and that was our kind of control. So we tried to predict things about your life using that, using this young and an idea and then using the big five. Why did you need the astrology thing? Oh, it's a good way to calibrate the statistics of our system to see if we... Yeah, if whether we can appear to be a astrology, right? Right, okay.

I would guess that Maya's Briggs performed probably quite poorly. I'd guess that the big five was more accurate, probably moderately accurate. I'd guess maybe it captures like, let's say maybe between 30 and 50% of the outcomes that someone gets. And then Myas Briggs is less, but I don't know how much less. Okay, that is a great guess. So I'll start with our control group, the Visiting Extend's astrology.

So it had a 0% predictive accuracy, which is all 42 outcomes. You literally have a bit of nothing about people. Now, okay, that's sort of what I expected, but I wanted to be fair and really give it a test. So we ran exactly the same procedure. Okay, then we look at the young antus and that predicted, so the way we measure this, it's a measure

called R, it was about .14. So basically you can think about that as it's a bit correlated with these outcomes. So .14 correlation to the outcomes when you use that. Sorry, so slightly worse than that. So it's .11, so it's about .11. So a little bit correlated outcomes. The big five was twice as good. So it's point two two. And this leads to a really funny thing, which is that Myers-Briggs ideas in our test was exactly halfway between

astrology and the big five. So it's kind of a fun tickle. Why do you think it's the case that Myers-Briggs is so much less accurate than the big five? Well, we study this quite extensively. So the first thought we had is maybe it's because the Myers-Briggs has four factors that it's measuring, right? So there's the E versus the I, the N versus the S, and so on. Whereas the big five has five factors. So maybe that's giving the big five an advantage. Now, to be fair, we design both tests at the same number of questions. So it wasn't the number of questions

that would make a difference. So then we could say, well, what if we get rid of the fifth factor of the big five? The fifth factor being neuroticism, which is a big five factor in personality that's least related to Myers-Briggs. And when we did that, it did hurt the accuracy of the big five. It fell from about 0.22 correlation to about 0.14,

but it still beat the Myers-Briggs, which is pretty wild. So that wasn't the full explanation. Even the four factors of the Myers-Briggs just seem to just not be doing as good a job as those four other factors of the big five. There's also another thing that really hurts the Myers-Briggs. So I said that had about a 0.11 correlation predicting these 42 outcomes, right? Well, that's actually being a little generous to the Myers-Briggs kind of test, because

very often when they're presented, they're done as decotomies, right? They don't give you a score on every trait. They say, you're an I or an E or an N versus S. This is typically how people use the test. You say, I'm an ENTJ, right? That actually hurts the accuracy even more. And the reason is because most percent on traits fall on a bell curve, right? If you imagine the shape of a bell,

there are lots of people in there, the middle of a trait, and there are fewer as you get further away from the center. The problem is if you dichotomize these traits, you're essentially cutting them down the middle. Imagine cutting a bell down the middle, and anyone who just happens to be the left side You you call an eye and I don't have to do the right thing

You're lumping you're lumping an awful lot of people some that are moderate some that are quite extreme and some that are very extreme all in together Precisely precisely and there's a whole bunch of people right near the margin So if they maybe if it you know they had their coffee ten minutes earlier today They might have answered one question differently and flipped from an eye to an e. So for that reason, these kinds of tests tend to be unstable. And so that actually, when you take that into account, it actually hurt the accuracy even more.

It falls from 0.1, 1 correlation to 0.08. Yeah, a lot of times. So all of the people who've got their Maya's Briggs personality type in their bios on Instagram and Twitter are halfway between a legitimate personality test and just saying Pisces. I would say in a way, but I do want to steal man, the point of view that says that the Myers Briggs style tests are actually a good test.

And the thing that I think is actually really useful about them is that they help provide a language that a lot of people use to communicate things about themselves and communicate things about each other. So I'm an ENTJ, according to Myers-Briggs, and if you tell someone that, it can communicate a lot of information very quickly. And so it provides a kind of shorthand language. It's also not totally useless. It doesn't have zero predict accuracy, right? It has some. So I don't want to discredit. I think it does actually help people understand themselves in each other. I just think we could do it in better if we use more accurate tests. So if you think it turns to the big five, which has five factors, it's got, this one has the acronym Ocean is Use.

So you've got O for openness, which is like openness to experiments, openness to ideas, being imaginative, things like that. You've got C, conscientiousness, just being organized, and disciplined, things like that. You've got C, conscientiousness, being like organized, and disciplined, things like that. You've got the E for extraversion, which is actually very similar to the Myersberg's extraversion. You've got A for agreeableness, which is being compassion and polite, and then N for neuroticism, which is experiencing intense emotions, anxiety, depression, things like that. Would you ever consider doing Hexico?

That's a great question. So some people have argued in favor of the Hexico? That's a great question. So some people have argued in favor of the Hexico model, which basically adds a six factor to the big five. And the basic argument goes that, so actually let me just step back and say, how is the big five invented at all? Like why are we, where do the big five come from? So the basic idea is they took all the different ways

you could describe someone in English language, so all these different adjectives. And they said English language, so all these different adjectives. And they said to people, for each of these adjectives, say which apply to yourself and say which don't. And then once they collected all this data, they did a statistical analysis. And what they were looking for is certain adjectives, if you say it applies to you, there are other adjectives that also probably applies will apply to you too. So if you say that you're organized, you also probably will say that you're rule of anger, something like that, right?

If you say that you're social, you also probably say that you're talking of. And so what they found just purely statistically, this is not theory driven, it was actually empirically driven, they found these five clusters of traits, right? That's where the ocean model comes from, OCEAN, each is a cluster of traits that cluster together. And then people also replicated this work by, instead of having people describe themselves,

they had people describe each other. And so they seem to get some more results. Now some psychologists have argued that you need to add a six factor. If you do the factor analysis in some settings, you get the six one and they call it the age factor and it stands for honesty humility. And so it's things like, you know, are you do you lie, do you manipulate people, do you brag, are you arrogant, things like, you know, are you do lie, do manipulate people, do you brag, are you arrogant, things like that.

It's sort of like the evilness factor to some extent. This is a debate that's raged back and forth in the psychology community about like to what extent is it really there, why is it not always found reliable. I mean, we did one test, this was a very preliminary test where we just tried to see if we could get better predictive accuracy using Hexico in the big five and we didn't see much advantage. So we generally just don't use it in our models because we just try to see if we could get better predictive accuracy using Hexico and the big five. And we didn't see much advantage.

So we generally just don't use it in our models because we just didn't see enough, enough reason to add it. You know, if you're going to add an at-sex factor, you want it to really be driving outcomes. Yeah. I like Hexico. I learned about honesty humility on an episode, maybe six months ago, about bullying, actually, really awesome episode about bullying. And it was the first time that anybody had ever folded

in the honesty humility element of it. And it really does make sense. It certainly feels like a dynamic, like an area of territory that isn't fully covered, that would also be important. But then, I mean, I can just, somebody else that has a different value set to me might say, oh, well, I think that this,

your opinion on ice cream is really important, or something else, right? Like, it's just me feeling out some idea about what I think matters. But yeah, the other explanation that I've heard for, or the justification for Hexico is that it aligns with evolutionary explanations more accurately, that it is able to be, you can use adaptive explanations for behavior more effectively when you're using Hexacode and when you're using the big five. But yeah, I think that you're really right. The Myers-Briggs, I'm an INTJ. I don't even remember what any of those stand for or what

that really means. But by making discreet buckets of this, it does cause people who are only, am I a moderate INTJ? Am I an extreme? Am I a capital I lowercase N? Like what's the proportion of this? But as you said, it allows you very, very quickly to communicate an awful lot of information about your personality.

And even if it's only, you know, a little bit correlated, that's more than saying, okay, so what percentile politeness are you? And what percentile agreeableness are? And what percentile, did it, did it, are you? Because that's like, how am I supposed to put all of this together? So I suppose, yeah, this trade-offs accuracy for brevity is a trade-off really that you're making

between big five and Myers-Briggs. Exactly. And so we actually also looked at why people like the myas breaks. So we included this in one of the studies we ran. And we found this fast-sounding thing. We showed people their young in rapport at the end of taking our study,

and we also showed them their big five report. And they felt that they were about equally accurate. So that was fast-sounding to us, because we know that we actually have more predictive power with the big five results. But people didn't perceive it as more accurate. We also found a really fascinating thing, which is that we ask people how good it is to make you feel.

And people found that the the youngy and report made them feel better than the big five report. And this makes sense if you start thinking about what the big five says. It says, Hey, buddy, you're disagreeable and neurotic and closed, right? And it's like, oh, yeah, that's not kind of makes you sound like shit. And whereas you, if you look at, you know, Myers-Briggs tests, where are they telling you they're not telling you you're bad. They're never telling you you're bad. You're saying you're either thinking you're feeling. Those both sound like great things, right? But if you think about the thinking feeling trade-off,

well, in big five, the closest thing is actually agreeableness, and it's telling you you're agreeable or disagreeable, right? Nine of those things sound good. Yeah, and neither of them sound good. And if you think about the sort of, the kind of myrobriggs approach with thinking feeling, what it's saying is that, oh no, it's not that you're either like a compassionate person feeling or your jerk, right? It's that you're either a compassionate person or your logic based, right? That sounds way better, right? You're not a jerk, right? It's that you're either a compassionate person or you're a logic based, right? That sounds way better, right? You're not a jerk, you just use a logic.

Much better branding for Myers-Briggs for all of the different types, yeah. And it gives you a nice language that the Big Five has struggled to give you that language that really concisely didn't say, I'm a blank, blank, blank, blank, and people are like, oh yeah, I got it. You also did some big studies on habit setting. Recently, obviously something that a lot of people

are very obsessive over atomic habits by James Clear, one of the best selling nonfiction books, maybe ever, but certainly of the last five years, probably the best selling nonfiction book over the last five years except for maybe some autobiographies. What did you learn from this big study? Yeah, so this was really exciting. We actually ran two really big studies. The first was actually kind of a bon big study. Yeah, so this was really exciting. We actually ran two really big studies.

The first was actually kind of a bonkers study. We said, we don't know what actually really works in the real world to help people form habit. So we're going to test 22 things simultaneously. And so the design of the study is we recruited large number of people, like something like 500 people, and we randomized them. So each person got five habit techniques picked from a set of 22 that we implemented. And then that, what that meant is at the end of the study, we could then analyze the relationship between which of these 22 techniques

someone was randomized to get and how they formed their habit. Did they succeeded ultimately? And there were some really interesting findings. So this was our first study and then later we went to confirm it. But the first study, some interesting findings. First of all, many of these techniques did not work at all, which was really fascinating to see. In fact, the vast majority of them completely bombed, right?

So that's the first takeaway. Human behavior changes are hard. That's fundamentally difficult. Lots of people want to go tell you that they have the one, you know, quick life hack to change your behavior. No, not really. Sorry, unfortunately, that doesn't work that way. The second thing that we found that was really interesting

is that motivation was a matter of a great deal. There was one of the strongest predictive factors of whether someone succeeded their habit, we just held motivated, they were at the beginning. This is kind of an obvious thing, but it actually really speaks to this idea that if you're going to try to form a new habit, try to pick one, you feel really motivated to do.

Like don't pick the one that you just like are force feeding yourself. Pick the one that you're really excited about because you actually probably will have a better chance to success. So obvious but useful insight. So that what actually worked in this pilot study, right? We found five things that actually seem to be promising. I'll just tell you about a couple of them.

I'm just going to give you a long list. But the first that was really interesting is this technique we call habit reflection. And the way that it works is you look back at a previous habit you've succeeded at. And you write down, and it's important to write this down, what did you do to help you succeed with that previous habit? Did you try to do it at the same time every day? Did you tell your friends that you wanted to do this habit? Or whatever, whatever it is

that you did that you think helped you succeed? Then you do the second step, which is you write down how you can apply those lessons to this new habit. And so it's really cool about this habit reflection technique. It only takes a few minutes, but it's sort of self-customizing. It's really an introspection exercise to figure out what works for you based on your own past results. So in a way, it's sort of dumb and obvious, but it's like, who would have

ever thought to do this? And it popped out. It's like the machine extrapolated volition for the alignment problem in, like, AGI, that you're using you to split test all of the different ideas. And then once you've come up with a winner, you refer back to you to sort the current problem. Absolutely. And it reminds me also of like some of the work

of Daniel Coniman and how do you get around things like the playing fallacy where people will say, oh, I'll get this project done two months and then it takes six months, right? And he's like, okay, go think back to past cases. Like how long did it actually take you in real situations that you were in that were similar? It's like, go back to your past habit and analyze it.

What actually worked? What didn't work, right? So simple but potentially very useful. Another one I want to mention, and this one takes a little bit of a preample. So one of the ideas I think is really powerful in habit formation is this idea of triggers. And so on my podcast, it's called Clear Thinking Podcast, I had an expert about habits and he had this really of triggers. And so on my podcast, it's called the Clear Thinking Podcast, I had an expert about habits. And he had this really nice acronym. When you think about habits,

you can think about the different triggers for those habits. So his name is Jim Davies. And he calls it the Habit acronym, HABIT, very convenient. So the first is that your habits can be triggered by the humans around you. That's the H. They can be triggered by the activity you're doing. That's the A.

They can be triggered by your bearing, which is where you are, like are you at your home or your office, then there's the I, that you can be triggered by your internal state, like if you're hungry or not, for example, and finally, to you the time of death, right? And so for our study, we were thinking about, well, is there some way to bring triggers into your habit

that's super simple, dead easy, anyone can do it? And so we came up with this ridiculously stupid method. We call home reminders. You just write notes to yourself and you place them around your home of like, when this happens, do this or here's the habit I'm going to do every day. And yeah, that was another one out of the 22. That was one of the best performing, straight as stupid as it is. So I mean, I love incredibly stupid, simple things that actually seem to work.

So I had laser eye surgery about three weeks ago now, and there is a protocol of eye drops that you need to keep, doing to keep the eye health good and whatever. And these eye drops come in little droppers, maybe sort of two mill, three mill droppers. And it's such a good idea because I've got them fucking everywhere. They are all over my house, which means I'm sat in my desk, it's like, it's probably been about two hours since I put eye droppers. I'm going to go to the bathroom, like I'll

take one of the droppers with me and I'll make sure that I do that, or the next to my bathroom upstairs in my bedroom or the, you know, wherever, like they're in my gym bag, they're everywhere. And that's kind of like a physical version of the post it note, I suppose. What are the other three? Run us through all five people. Oh, sure. You want to know the big winners. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Okay, so we've got habit reflection, hummander, as the ones we talked about. The next one is mini habits. And this will be familiar to people that have read James Clear's book. The idea is you take the habit that you want to form. Let's say you want to like, you're like, okay, I want to do my full workout routine every morning. You design a tiny version of this that is so fast and simple that you never have an excuse not to do it. And then basically you set a rule that if you do not have time or effort, motivation,

whatever, to do the full version, you at least have to do the mini version, right? So your mini version might be, okay, do time pushups. You never have to excuse that to do time pushups. You know, if you keep, well, assuming you can do time pushups, but you may have a, you know, maybe you have a legit excuse not to go to the gym for 40 minutes, right? Right. And then what's the reason why is that so effective at keeping the habit going, why don't people just tumble into only doing 10 push-ups and never going to the gym? Yeah, it's a good question,

because you could worry, okay, maybe I'm just gonna every day do 10 push-ups instead. But I think my theory is that the bigger problem is not that you start the habit and you don't do the full thing. It's that you actually just don't do the habit, right? So it's like, it's just establishing the habit is more important than doing the full habit because it's a bigger failure mode. So the key is never miss a day, even if it means you just do 10 push-ups,

because at least the 10 push-ups then is an opportunity to remind yourself, oh, my goal is actually good at the gym, right? Where's the bigger problem is four weeks from now, you're just like not even thinking about going to gym at all. How much of this do you think is the story that we tell ourselves about momentum and consistency and like shame and guilt and self-doubt around whether or not we can achieve things? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's this powerful idea that success is motivating for further success. And so let's say that every day you only do 10 pushups when you

meant to go do 40 minutes of gym, you might actually feel bad about that. You might actually feel like you failed. And but that's just a framing thing, right? It's just like, well, you decided that's a failure. When I would actually encourage is the opposite. Say until you've established, yes, if every single day you're doing 10 pushups, now it's time to set the by heart bar higher and say, okay, can I go to the gym for four minutes? But until you are doing temposh every single day without fail, if you do it, you should feel good about that. You're like, yes.

I was saying that the reason I think this does work is that if you don't have even anything that is the microcosm version of the proper habit, then you are generally a piece of shit, right? Like, I didn't go to the gym at all, I didn't even do one push-up, I just laid in bed. I think that it helps to avoid the downward spiral of that pattern recognition. Oh, I'm the sort of person that doesn't go to the gym. I'm exactly the sort of person that wouldn't do this thing. And before you know it, James talks so much about like identity-based habit change, which I guess maybe one of the remaining two,

or maybe not. But this works with identity-based habit change. Like if you are the sort of person who goes to the gym for 40 minutes on average two or three times a week and on the days that you don't, you're the sort of person that makes sure that they do 10 push-ups at home. I think you can probably say that,

yeah, I'm like a physically disciplined person. I do, when I say I'm going to do a thing, I do a thing. And kind of like the Myers-Briggs being quite binary, this also reduces down the binary nature. It also almost gives you a spectrum of habits to go on, right? You're not just, I did the habit going to the gym, which was a one or zero, I didn't go. There's like, oh, there's like a, there's like a 50th percentile here, which is, I did 10 push-ups. Absolutely. Yeah, it gives you a finer grain reward system. You don't have to, it doesn't have to be a complete success or a complete failure, right? And I think, I think this kind of idea is especially important

for people that are really struggling, like if you're struggling with really severe depression, a really severe anxiety, maybe just a little thing is all you can manage right now, and that could be a huge success for you. So you don't need to set your goal really high and then feel like you're failing. Set your goal at something achievable.

You should be able to do it with high rate of success, and then go do it. And now you're like, okay, well, maybe I'm not working out for it today, but I'm doing time pushups today and that's something to feel good about. And then now you can put your app on top of that. So, all right, number four.

Okay, number four, again, we love super simple, stupid things, but the key is to do the work, because most of them don't mess up. So, the next one is, we usually call it support of a friend. And so here the idea is, think of someone in your life who would actually be helpful at supporting your habit. And go tell them about it,

and ideally suggest a way that they can support your habit. So this is going to vary from person to person. You know, sometimes it might be a partner who can help motivate you, or maybe they have a habit, and they can remind you to do it with them every day. Maybe a friend who can check in periodically, maybe, yeah, maybe a buddy you're gonna go to the gym with, right? So there's

a lot of different ways this can operate, but basically involving another person who's going to play support for you. And of course, it's up to you who is supportive and who's going to demotivate you, right? And that brings us the final one, which is against super simple, which is we call listing habit benefits. You simply, this is right at the beginning, when you're forming your habit, you just make a list of all the reasons that this is a thing you want to do and all the benefits it's going to give you. And it's just trying to give you, you know, going back to motivation and how key that was to be able to succeed and how predictive it was.

You're trying to do is bootstrap that motivation. Once you've decided this is the thing I'm going to try to do, you want to get your motivation level as high as you can. And you can also review that benefit list from time to time to help like, to you know, respond that motivation if it's flagging. Out of the original 22 techniques, which were the ones that worked the absolute worst, whether any that had a negative impact on habit setting, or whether any that were just like this is completely pointless?

Oh, that's a great question. Well, I'll tell you the most shocking one that didn't work, which is in the academic literature, there's this technique called Woop. It's like wish, outcome, obstacle plan, I think it's the answer. And the idea, it's this idea that there's been a long established and academic literature that basically what you do is you think about this goal that you're going to try to achieve. And then you think about the outcomes if you do successfully achieve it, but then you think about the obstacles in the way to achieving it. And then finally, you come up with a plan.

When this obstacle comes up, I'm going to do this, when this obstacle comes up, I'm gonna do this. When that obstacle comes up, I'm gonna do that. It's very, it makes sense and twiddly that it would work. We thought it was gonna work. We even powered our study specifically to test it, because we just thought, okay, this is a nice standard intervention that we can compare against, and we didn't get a result for it. So, I don't necessarily wanna blame it on that technique.

Like, you know, it's always possible, it was a fluke, or we didn't implement it right in some way, but I was shocked that this did not do anything. Wow. That is interesting. I think I'm pretty sure I've written down in previous journals when I've been wanting to do, here's a contingency and this is what I will overcome and so on and so forth. Yeah.

I suppose. Now, don't stop using it if it works for you, but look at the academic literature. See, come to your conclusion, the consensus on it. Yeah, I think most people will combine a bunch of these together for habits, and this is the problem that you're not doing a univariate analysis on exactly what contributed to your habits sticking or not sticking. Maybe you had a fruit bowl that you bought that's now out. Well, that's kind of like one of your visual triggers.

It's like a post-it note that's kind of lying around. And then maybe there was some other thing. So there's just a lot of different elements that always contribute to this. And they're very rarely going to be done in isolation, which is exactly why we needed you to do your study. Yeah, so we were trying to figure this out. But here's the problem with the original study design. We tested so many things that you could very reasonably say,

well, but maybe it was false positives, maybe it was flukes, etc. And so we wanted to really try to confirm this. So what we did is we took these five best interventions that I mentioned already. We packaged them to one tool, and it's completely free. You can use it right now if you want. It's called DailyRitual, and it's on our website clearthinking.org. So you can go use it, help you form a new habit. And we tested that in a randomized control trial. So this was a new study designed

to test that tool. And very happily, it actually succeeded in helping people sick their habit more compared to the control group. And so we tracked their habits over eight weeks and those who used the DailyRitual tool, stuck them in a more reliable rate. So that was really satisfying to see. Alia, and so that's a stack of these on top of each other. Yeah, because it's interesting, in real life, any one thing is probably not gonna have an absolutely profound impact.

You occasionally it does, but usually it's more additive. And so, once we had this initial study, we're like, we've got five promising things. Let's just make the stack that is most promising. And it's even possible that one or two of those doesn't do anything, but we're like, with the stack, the stack works. We're not 100% sure every ingredient is helpful. Yeah, I love it. What about valueism? This is your personal philosophy that I've never heard of before, but I think you've had some personal success with what is valueism?

never heard of before, but I think you've had some personal success with what is valueism? Yeah, so you haven't heard of it because I invented it. But on the other hand, like, you know, there are many elements of it that have been inspired by lots of other things, so to say that. But, so let me start by talking about values, because I think that's sort of the core layer of this. And I will say, valueism is my personal life philosophy. I've written a series of essays about it. If you want to read those,

it, I have found it to be a very fruitful life philosophy. And it's my attempt to really answer the question, what should you do with your life, especially if you don't have some big police system that you want to like, okay, maybe if you are a Catholic and you believe all of the Catholic ideas then like maybe that gives you a structure of like how to live your life. I'm out of Catholic. You know, I don't have, I don't have that overarching kind of structure.

I'm like, what should I do with my life? How should I spend my time? This is my time to answer that question. Starting with values, I like to think of values as being different into two types. There's intrinsic values and instrumental values. Intrinsic values are the things we value for their own sake. We value them not just as a means to an end, but we value them fundamentally, right? So an example of this is being happy.

Like if you're like, oh, I did this thing and it made me really happy and someone's like, well, why do you care? Why don't you care about being happy? You'd be like, oh, I just value it, right? Like there's nothing really deeper than that. You just want to be happy, right? Whereas instrumental values are things that we value

merely because they get us other things. So classic example is money. Imagine you were on a deserted island, you had tons of money, but it didn't burn. As you couldn't make fires with it, you can't spend it on anything. It's not even warm enough to make a blanket out of it. It would be totally useless, right?

So money, they'll cash, literally dollars, have no intrinsic value. They have lots of instrumental value. You can use them to buy lots of things. You can give them the way to help the world, et cetera, but they're not intrinsically valuable. And the reason that I draw this distinction is because a lot of people waste a lot of time going after things they instrumentally value and they forget that they don't actually intrinsically value these things. So they forget that they're a means to an end. They, you know, and they treat

them like that and in itself. And I think, you I think many of us have seen this happen with money, for example, where someone seems to be mindlessly pursuing money way past the point where it's even causing any positive benefit for them. It's just sort of like they attach to the idea of just making the number go up. So that's the first base is we think about instrumental bias and intrinsic bias.

Stop there, see if you had any questions about that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, That's the whole life philosophy. And you might say, well, why? What's the point? Why would you go work out your intrinsic values and then try to use effective methods to create the things you're trying to value? Well, it's like, because that is the things you deeply value. That's actually what you're brain like psychologically finds valuable. So like go do that thing. And when I say it that way, it sounds incredibly stupid and obvious. It's like, well, duh. But here's the really crazy thing. A stupid and obvious, as it seems, very few will live by this life philosophy. And often when I've told people about,

they're like, oh, that makes so much sense. That's like crystallizing this thing that I had in the back of my mind that I like didn't have a precise way of stating, right? So that's what I'm trying to do. It's like crystallize this idea and turn it into like a specific life philosophy, even though lots of people might be like hovering around this idea,

but just not have ever thought about it in that precise way. What are some of the potential pitfalls when someone is taking inventory of their intrinsic values? Yeah, good question. So the first pitfall is that people often can view them with their instrumental values. We spent a lot of time researching this. So again, for our website, clearthinking.org, we developed this thing called the intrinsic values test. You can go on there, it's free. It will help you figure out what your intrinsic values are.

When we first designed this test, we ran a study, and we put people through a little thing asking them about their intrinsic values, is this intrinsic value? And we found that tons of people, even though we had defined intrinsic value for them, they put instrumental values instead. They put things that are like, oh, getting a car or getting money,

or having healthy food. And it's like, no, no, no, no. And so what we realized is, oh, no, we actually have to teach people in the tool how to separate these out. And it's like a pretty complex presence. So we have to end it up as part of the tool. The first thing you go through is a little mini training module.

The teaches you how to separate them, and actually gives you examples and quizzes you. And then gives you the test. So it helps you really kind of clarify. So that's the number one first challenge. So in addition to that, I think another challenge with intrinsic values is that they often come in conflict with each other. So an example that has come up with me before is I could be honest with a friend, but I

know they would hurt their feelings, right? And one of my deep intrinsic values is being honest. It's telling the truth. But another deep intrinsic value of mine is not causing suffering suffering, especially not causing suffering for people I care about. And so I think when we actually try to use this as a practice, we very quickly will realize that the situations arise where intrinsic values are in conflict, and then we have to start naving a map. And so in my kind of sequence of essays about valueism, that's like the second essay is like, what do you do in here? Interestic values conflict with each other. Yeah, what do you do?

Ah, so what I find really helpful is restating the trade-off in terms of your intrinsic values. So you start with this complicate, and this doesn't have to be done with friends many times, it's not really useful. Like a friend will come with a problem, they're starting going with, I'll listen to their problem and I'll say, hey, it sounds to me like you've got these values, X and Y. And then if you do the first option, you get a bunch of X, but you sacrifice Y. If you do the second option, you get a bunch of Y, you sacrifice it. And they're like, oh my god, yes, this is exactly what's happening.

So that's my first step. It's really try to rewrite the problem in terms of like the intrinsic values on either side of the choices. And then once you've done that, sometimes you're lucky and you're realized, oh, like one side's a clear winner in terms of my values, it was maybe a difficult, it may be a felt like a difficult decision because maybe one of the sides of the choice

was painful or stressful or whatever, but when you put it in terms of values, it's just really clear ones the winner. And if you don't do that one, it's because you're not acting like you're ideal self, right? So that's the first thing that happened. And I think that is sort of the easier case. The more difficult case is when there's a fundamental

trade-off in your values. And now you're like, oh, wait, it turns out there's some people that the first choice would be better for based on their values. And there's some people that the second choice would be better for based on their values. And actually, which one is better? It's fully dependent on how much I value those different things. How much do I value this much honesty versus this much suffering caused to a friend?

There is no objective answer. It now is just on me to think about how much I care about those two things and then think some of the pressure off because it's like, oh no, this is now about how much I value those things. I'm not like failing to live up to some objective standard. That's interesting. Do we choose our values? What do you think values come from? That is a great question. Do we choose our values? So I think partly, partly our values are ingrained in us, evolutionarily, or at least the capacity to have those values. For example, even like a baby doesn't like pain, right? So that's, you know, so some of them are ingrained and our capacity for the other ones are also, you know, built into us.

We have the capacity to do our genes. But that's not the only thing. After that, we have all these life experiences and I think those impact our values. And then I think our culture and what we're taught impact our values. I think our values tend to be pretty stable when you're in your mid-20s to 30s. They can still change a bit, but they tend to not change very much. An example of them changing, let's say someone, well, to go back to a religious example,

let's say someone is devout Catholic, and then they have a crisis of faith. That could actually change some of their values, or if someone's an atheist, and then they suddenly have an experience of God, that could change some of their values. But more or less, they tend to be stable. And some people will ask, well,

should I try to change my values? And I think there, the answer is no. Like your values are the things you find them like care about. Why would you change that? Unless, in some special cases, you might have a value that says you should change your values. But that's kind of an unusual edge case. Okay. Yeah, it's an interesting one, man. I've had a lot of conversations over the last few years about values. And I think what I originally had as values, they weren't fully instrumental, but they weren't fully intrinsic either. So stuff like curiosity, adventure, self-development, excellence, they don't feel sufficiently

firm to me. So I'm going to have to go and do your tool and see how I get up with that strategy. I'd love to hear anything about intrinsic values tests, but it's interesting that things you mentioned, because there's another class of things that's also important, which are virtues, which I would differentiate from values. So it might be that it could be that you're thinking of virtues that you want to live by or you want to reflect. But also it could cross over into intrinsic values as well. So for example, I have a intrinsic value of telling the truth and that's highly connected to a virtue of like being an honest person. So there's definitely a big virtue. Yeah, interesting. So there's another layer Taylor Pearson taught me about this a while ago.

a Pearson taught me about this a while ago. He has a list of operating principles that his life follows. And I think that if I was to go complete monk mode and work values, virtues or ethics and operating principles, I think that's a really nice sort of stack that takes you from the philosophical wishy washi to the strategic tactical spit and sawdust, take stuff. Because what you're going to say is, I am faced with this particular problem regularly where my values come into conflict with other values and my values just come into conflict with general discomfort in the world. I need to tell somebody something that they don't want to hear, but one of my values is truth. Therefore, what is the strategic way that I go about things when I know that I need to tell somebody

something within the space of 24 hours from when I have that first thought? I'm going to speak to them and I'm going to do it in a calm of a way as possible, something like that, right? Like, I want to be, I don't know if this would class as a value, but certainly one of the best life hacks I've ever heard is payin' voices immediately. Like payin' voices immediately because if you get known as the sort of person that pays immediately, your suppliers or whoever it is, your landlord's gonna like you more, your friends are gonna like you more, you've been out for dinner and someone asks you to pay power them a hundred bucks because they paid on their Amix card because

they're spending the limit for the month. And it takes you three weeks. Like, just you get known as the guy that takes three weeks to pay somebody back for dinner, just do it straight away. And it's such a great operating principle for life. I think pay people that you owe them immediately if you can. It's so funny you mentioned principles because actually last year we released a module on figuring out your life principles. You need to also, again, take our website, clearthing.org, it's a free module, figure out your principles. And the reason that we developed it is because we realized, just like you're saying, that there's sort of the stack of layers to the person, to you. And in that stack, the way I think about it,, that there's sort of the stack of layers to the person, to you.

And in that stack, the way I think about it, the bottom there's values, right? It's like, I think of intrinsic values at the very bottom, like the things that you've most fundamentally value. And then you build things on top of that. You build your plans, right? And you build your goals. And so what is a good goal? A good goal, from my point of view, is something that's challenging in the future that helps

you create the things that you value. And your plan is what's a good plan. A plan, a good plan is something that helps you achieve your goals reliably. And what is a good decision? It's something that, you know, moves you directionally towards achieving your goals and so on. And then, so where's principle slide in? It's I thought about this a lot. And I think that principles are decision-making heuristics.

So if we think about a good decision as something that moves you towards achieving your goals, a principle is a decision-making heuristic or rule of thumb that helps you in practice, make your decisions more efficiently, and avoiding issues of self-control or self-doubt. So for example, I have a life principle that when I make a mistake, I should acknowledge it,

and I should try to learn from it. And so that's really clarifying for me, because I know it's life principle that when I make a mistake, I should acknowledge it and I should try to learn from it. And so that's really clarifying for me because I know it's life principle. I haven't written down, I review my life principles periodically. And so let's say I make a mistake and I like my brain's like, well, what should I do now? I don't even have to think about it. It's like, oh, I need to acknowledge it

and then I need to try to learn from it, right? So I find principles to be really powerful. And they're just another layer in this stack of what it is to be you. What about insights in other domains of your life or the world? Have you learned any of those since becoming a fully fledged, paid up value list?

Have you realized other things about the way that the world works or other people operate? Oh man, I mean, so many things. So one thing that I've observed, as I think, thought more about valueism, is that there are a lot of people that are confused about what their values are versus other people's values. And I think this is especially common for people

that either were raised with parents that put a lot of pressure on them, or people that maybe tend to be less assertive and maybe tend to get dictated by other people. But I have an anecdote about this, which is that a friend of mine was feeling really depressed. And she knew it had something to do with her boyfriend, and she was really confused. And so I sat down with her, and she's like, I don't get it. He's such a great guy. And yet something about the relationship is deeply unfathomable to me. And I said, okay, let's talk about it.

Like, tell me about how he's a great guy. And she wrote down a list of all his great qualities. And I said, okay, cool. Now let's write down what your values are. And she wrote down another list. And I compared them side by side. And I was like, you know what's fascinating? He is a great guy.

But none of the things are great about him are in line with what you care about. And then I was like, okay, I have an idea here. Write down your parents values. So she wrote that down, like almost perfectly matched her boyfriend. And I was like, okay, I think it's pretty clear what's happened here.

You're dating, the person your parents want to parent want you to date. And so I think this is a really common family. We actually live for other people's values. Wow, that is very, very interesting. Yeah, it feels like,'s a relationship here, a correlation with the relationship we have with our future self and the relationship that we have with our past self. Right?

You're existing in the now, you're making goals and plans and even thinking about your values because there will be a future you, which is going to benefit from it, that person is going to be more well-rounded. And then you also have this continuity bias. What does it mean that I used to do that in the past? How, what does it mean that I am the same person that I was in the past even though I feel like a different person? You know, it's been seven years since I had that memory. All of my cells have been replaced.

I'm ship of theses to my way into like not even existing as the same person anymore. I've got this continuity of consciousness and what's gonna happen in future and where am I gonna be? Like it feels like this relationship that we have across time with ourself and then the projection of what we could become

or would want ourselves to become. And then sometimes we can make deals today that our future self has to pay or cash or you know checks that they have to cash in future. Yeah, there's definitely something going on there. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's a really powerful idea that we just mentioned of like making deals with your future self at something that that I do. You know, like, for example, a really simple way to pull that off is to say, okay, you really don't want to do these tax farms. These tax forms are huge painly asked,

but if you do them, you get to do this special thing afterwards, that you don't normally let yourself do, and you get to splurge. And so that's, what is that? It's just a deal with your future self and you're like, your present self's like, all right, fine. But I'll do tax forms. But I'm actually feeling a values conflict right now

because my cat really wants to get out of this room. Get out. Go and get it. Get the cat. Marushi. Here we go. Say hi, Marlon. Cats, man.

They're only good for half an hour in a podcast. Just sitting peacefully in the background They're only good for half an hour on a podcast. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And he had this, you know, one of those gyroscopic perpetual motiony type things and you'd spin it on your desk and it would go in kind of a chaotic pattern. And he used to have this thing on his desk and he must just give it a kick before he started every video. And I promise you, I couldn't stop looking at this perpetual motion thing.

I've got this guy and he's, you know, being expressive and talking and explaining stuff and sometimes even like holding things up. Meanwhile, I'm watching this this perpetual motion machine in the background. So yeah, dogs, dogs and cats have to have the same thing. When it comes to being a card carrying value list, what are the hardest things about following this philosophy? Where are the hair shirts hiding in your in your ideals? Yeah, I think that one of the hardest things is that when you really pay attention to your values, you realize there's a bunch of ways you're not living according to your values. Or another way to say that is if you think about who you are and you think about what the ideal version of you is like, there's ways that you don't live up to that.

The way there's ways that you are being driven by what other people want you to do, but that are not in line with your values. There's ways that you're maybe seeking social status when you really, your values tell you you should be more focused on something else. Not to say there's nothing wrong with caring about social status, some extent, but maybe you're not living in accordance with your values in that way. There may be ways that you're not being as honest as your values tell you to be and so on. Here's a really simple example.

I know lots of people who really, really care about animals. If they saw an animal being hurt in the street, they would be extremely upset and distraught. And yet they might take actions that contribute to animals being harmed, right? And so, it's like, oh, wait, if you're trying to live according to your values, what does that say about the choices you make and the food you eat and so on? And I think I use that one example because it's a really stark example. But I think there are a lot of these things that come up is that reflecting on your values also makes you deeply aware that you're not always loving a grand your values.

What do you think about the usefulness and the role of intuition when it comes to decision-making? Ah, good question. Well, yeah, this is something that I've thought about a great deal. usefulness and the role of intuition when it comes to decision-making? Good question. Well, yeah, this is something that I thought about a great deal. And you know, I always find it interesting when you have two sides that yell at each other, and yet both sides have good points, but they never seem to resolve their argument. And so the two sides that I see yelling at each other on this are, you have a lot of people who deeply trust their intuitions, and they really stand behind that. They're like, I didn't use to trust my intuition, but I learned to trust it and things are so much better for me now. And they advocate that other people trust it. And then if someone says,

how do I decide, they're like, just go with what you're guys telling you, right? And then there's the other side that are like, they tend to be more rationalistic or academic. And they say, no, our intuitions are just riddled with biases. And it's like, people like constantly telling you to trust your intuition, your intuition is dumb. You didn't get to use rational analysis and be analytic. And I'm like, I look at those two sides, and I'm like, man, they both have some great points.

So that's been a bunch of time thinking about this. Like, what is really true on this subject? And so I developed this thing, I call the fire framework. So it's acronym, F-I-R-E, fire. And it's about when should you trust your gut? When do you trust your intuition? And when should you second guess your intuition and use a more rational analytical analysis?

And so the acronym kind of tells you when you could trust your gut. And so the first letter, F for fire, that sends for fast decisions. And so imagine you're driving down the highway, you're going 50 miles an hour, and then a car suddenly going the opposite direction, it swerves into your lane. You don't have time to use rational analysis. You will die if you use rational analysis. The first time when you have treasure got is with fast decisions, for obvious reasons,

because our intuition is just so much faster. You can see this with things like sports or martial arts, where at first, when they're learning it, they may be doing a lot of thinking, but when they're actually really in the game, almost all of it is automated and going with their, going with their gut. Okay, the second eye is irrelevant decisions. So let's say you're like, oh man, I, you know, I'm trying to order a salad, but I just don't know. Should I get carrots in it or not? Like, it is not worth 10 minutes of your life figuring out why they get carrots in your salad, right? You just go with your gut.

Or this is a really common one. You're trying to figure out what TV show I'm moving to watch. And like, you ever do this with friends and you smell like an hour trying to pick and you're like, oh my god, it's like, why waste of time? I mean, better, we flipped it coin, right? So, no, just go with your gut with it with an irrelevant decision, right?

Okay, so that's the first two times when you should go with your gut. The third one is really interesting and important. That's the R for repetitious decisions. So the idea here is that your intuition is not magic. It is very much not magic, but it is very smart. So when is it smart? It's smart when it gets to do a thing again and again, and it gets feedback. So to think about this, imagine that you're learning archery. So you've got your bow and arrow, you're firing at the target. The only problem is you're blindfolded and you also have earplugs. So you can never find out if you hit the target or not.

How long would it take you to learn to be a good archer? I think the answer is infinite time. Forever. Yeah. Forever. You would never write. Okay. Now let's suppose, okay, let's suppose you get to take the blindfold off, the ear plugs off, but because you have a vision problem and a hearing problem, you only have 50% reliability of knowing whether you hit the bulls-eye or not, right? Well, now, maybe you could learn a bit. You could learn a little bit, but it would take so long

to learn, right? You might need thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of repetitions. Whereas if you get to see exactly where you hit on the target is time, after each arrow shot, you're gonna learn so much faster. And in fact, eventually your intuition will get so good, you don't even need to think about it.

You can just pull back the bow and fire, you know, a perfect shot once you've done enough. And so I think this is a good metaphor for how our intuition works. Our intuition is, or essentially, are different parts of our mind, constantly monitor the world and constantly see what happens. And constantly see whether the action we took got to the result we wanted.

And so if you take someone like Magnet Carlson who's played in Sanley's large number of games of chess, you can drop him into a game of chess. And he instantly knows what to do. He does not need to do rational analysis. And he will still absolutely beat you. In fact, there's a wonderful game he plays against three pretty good chess players, where he beats the crap out of all of them. He makes his moves essentially instantaneously within seconds.

But the craziest part is he doesn't get to see the board. It's all like memorizing his head during the games. He beats them all. It's so crazy. It's because it actually requires no rational thought for him to play chess. However, let's say he played a new game. He's never seen his life totally different roles. Maybe it's not a chess board, totally different roles.

He might be a bit better than the average, but he's not going to be very good. And his intuitions are actually going to sometimes lead him to do exactly the wrong move. Right? And so he's going to incorrectly pattern match. This is like that situation in chess. No, it's not. Magnus, it's got nothing to do with chess. He's going to have to keep overriding his intuitions because his chess mind is going to situation in chess. No, it's not, Magnus, it's got nothing to do with chess. He's gonna have to keep overriding his intuitions

because his chess mind is gonna be- There he is. He's got chess pieces, right? And so I think that a lot of the magic of our intuition, the seeming magic is because our brain is always watching and always learning and it gets really good at things, it gets shockingly good. In fact, it gets so good that sometimes you're like,

I don't even know how I know that thing, but I just know it. And it's because, yeah, it's been watching your entire life and learning. A good example of this, sometimes you just get a bad vibe about a person. And like, and sometimes there's a wrong, you know, first person's reaction can be wrong.

But I think they're right a lot of times, surprisingly often. I think when you get a bad vibe of meeting someone in the first 10 minutes, it's like, you're a pretty good chance you picked up on something real. Very interesting. Is that the, that's all, that's repetitive?

That's all. So we did the last one, evolutionary decisions. And so this, the E for evolutionary decisions, the idea here is that, well, we were created by evolution, right? That's where we came from. And if you look at an animal, like a cat or a snake, you notice, they have a bunch of reactions that they seem to know how to do, and they didn't seem to learn it from their parents right. Well we too are animals of a sort right. And so there are some things we know how to do our gut knows how to do them that we never had to learn. And so an example of this if a spoon

puts a steak in front of you and it smells rotten don't eat it right like that is an evolutionary intuition that you have. If you hear suddenly and extremely loud noise, you will probably jump away before you even realized it. And that is probably a really good decision because the chance that a bunch of like, you know, gold is about to land your hands is much lower than the chance that you're really bad is about to happen to you, right? So that intuition that a really loud noise means something dangerous is occurring is a pretty

good intuition. It's not always right, but it's a good intuition So so there are a whole bunch of these evolutionary at once But so that's the idea the fire framework that these four situations fast decisions Relevant decisions repetitious decisions and evolutionary decisions when you can trust your gut and outside of that is when Rational analysis tends to lead to better outcomes Got you have you got any strategies for how people can integrate intuition and subconscious into their more reflective rational decision making? I think that's probably a lot of what people want. You know, I understand, I probably need to think about this a little bit, but

I feel like I'm maybe applying more cerebral horsepower to this than I need to. And it's causing me discomfort. I'm sort of weighed down with all of the different thought structures about this thing. I kind of just want to think about it a bit, then feel it, and then go. Yeah, it's a great question, because, okay, we say, all right, well, there's certain times when you want to do reflective decision making, analytical decision making, but like, how do you do that? Right. And I think a common failure mode there is ignoring your intuition. And so, there's a really big distinction between letting your analysis run the show and ignoring your intuition. There's not the same thing. So, let's think of an example. Imagine that you meet someone and you have a bad reaction

to them like a few minutes of meeting them, right? And then you're thinking about it later. And now your intuition there has some real information and important information. And some people they'll think rationally and they'll be like, well, but they didn't really do anything wrong and if I like replay the conversation in my head, there wasn't any specific thing they said

that like indicate they were a bad person or whatever. But to ignore your intuition there is a dumb idea. At the same time, to let it completely determine your view this person, if you go around bad math in this person now, that's probably not warranted either. And so it's like the right way to do reflection is to incorporate the intuition and learn from it what you can, uses a source of information,

but not necessarily completely run the show, right? And so how do you do that? Well, part of it is that you can try to hone in on what your intuition is picking up on, right? And I find thought experiments can be really useful with this. So you could say, for example, let's say this person rebelled the wrong way, you could think to yourself, hmm, well, was it the first part of the conversation?

Like if I just had the first part of the conversation, would I have had a negative vibe? No, no, actually that would have been OK. You know, was this something about like your facial expression? You know, like, let's say that they had been smiling. Do you think I would have processed differently? And so you can kind of try to like, you know, zoom in on like what your interest is picking up on.

It's a little bit like if you're studying like what a neural net is doing. It's like how did your intuition is kind of like a neural net. It's this giant network that's doing these incredibly complex operations, but they're kind of hidden. And then later, you know, AI researchers are like, well, what on earth was this neural net picking up on? How did it decide? What's a dog?

What's a cat? And they'll try to like back that out. And they'll try to say, well, it seemed to be honing in on these parts of the image. And so maybe it's picking up on whiskers or, you know, yeah, it's interesting to think about how our intuition and our sort of cognition battle against each other. And after a while, I've certainly found this with myself, I can end up talking myself out of or into pretty much any sensation or emotion. And then after a while, you don't even have a relationship with your intuition anymore.

You have a relationship with the story that you told yourself about what your intuition meant, which is now taken it from the realm of intuition into the realm of cognition. And now you're trying to think, what does it mean that I'm the sort of person that thinks that I'm the sort of person that takes their intuition into the realm of cognition. Yeah, the spiral is useless. Yeah, it's really tricky. I think a lot of people struggle with this. I have a friend who had some really traumatic things happen to her. She found that it became increasingly difficult to hone in on her intuition and to trust

it. I think what happens sometimes on her intuition and to trust it. And I think what happens sometimes is your intuition can kind of get noisy. Like let's say you have a traumatic event and you're feeling fear a lot of the time. Maybe you're feeling fear all the time. And then suddenly it's like, well, okay, I'm afraid. Does that mean something bad is about to happen? Or is it just like my, you know, hyperactive system is all fired up, right? And then you can learn.

And then with that, you can start to learn to not trust your intuition, right? Which is also really bad. It's like, you have these two incredibly powerful tools. You've got your power of analysis and reasoning, and you've got your intuition. And some people are saying, no, just leave one tool in the toolbox, you're like, are you crazy? Why would you ever do that?

You've got these two really powerful tools. Learn to be a master of both of them, right? Yeah, you say,'ve spoke off line about the importance of becoming wise, something that you care about a lot as well. Why do you think it's so important and what's your definition of wisdom? Yes, well, I think this is really relevant

just because of the name of your podcast. I actually wanted to ask you, do you got a podcast, it's called Modern Wisdom. What is wisdom to you? Why did you call that? The reason I called it that was I wanted to try and have something that felt sufficiently connected to the accumulated human knowledge bank that I wanted to be dipping into, but it was purposefully built for the mismatched contemporary environment

that we find ourselves in, right? That I got to the end of my 20s and I didn't really understand myself or how the world worked or how I was supposed to behave and what my values should be and what ethics were. And I felt like I should know these things that it wasn't unknown knowledge. I wasn't asking questions for which there were no answers that were known. It was just that I needed to be shown the way. And then importantly, the tactical slash applied element of it is, okay, and what does this mean to take some, you know, Arist tell you an ethic and then try and apply it to a world for which it wasn't originally written.

You know, I think a lot of people know things, but when it comes to understanding their application, it's rough. Like people get stuck, you know, they've got the quote written on their whiteboard or they've, it's their background of their phone screensaver. But ultimately, like the spit and sawdust of whether or not this thing happens is it's applicability. It's strategically, tactically, can I actually apply this thing? When it comes to wisdom, I think your actions having the consequences that you intended them to have

is probably not far off for me. Like intention, action, and outcome being aligned feels like something that's right, but there's one bit that's missing there, which is what did you intend to intend? There's one step above. There's one more step that I've missed out of that. You would have thought after 700 episodes of a show called Modern Wisdom, I know it has some beautiful succinct definition of it, and I did for a while, but I actually found that having some cookie cutter, maybe it was written by me, probably some Frankenstein's monster bastardized from a bunch of different people, I actually found that that was a bit constricting because I had already made answer when people

asking me this question. I had already made answer that I churned out that didn't require me to assess, do I still believe that this is true? And I had a conversation with Sam Evans, this dude who spent a lot of time creating internet content, and he actually stopped doing all of his content for the same reason. He found that he was making proclamations on his YouTube videos and on his podcasts that his real world self felt the obligation to live up to. See, he was saying things in the virtual world, that him in the real world then felt the need to actually go out and do.

And then he was like being held hostage by statements that he'd made and he had this very sort of strange persona personality relationship going on and he felt attention with that. So just generally as a rule, I think it's nice to have, it's kind of like the, to bring it full circle, it's kind of like the Myers-Briggs of, of personal development. Like it's nice to have a succinct, simple way, somebody asks you in an elevator, like M&I and TJ or whatever,

but the actual deeper version of this is to have the sliding scale, which is more like big five. It's like, okay, what do I actually think about this? Used to have this idea, it was about action and intention and outcome kind of being the same, but you know, they've got this other bit that I've added in that it doesn't feel like it's a part of it. So I think that's, I think just as a meta, meta, meta rule,

I think that's really important to continually assess the like common place book answers that you have for questions that you regularly end up talking about and assess those pretty frequently and periodize it. Like give yourself an answer, sit back, rely on that for a little while, then fight with some of the definitions or some other terms that you're looking at

and then come back in. But yeah, that's my idea around wisdom and the name and the definition. Oh, and I really like that. I think you captured a lot of the critical elements. And what I find really fascinating about wisdom is it seems like one of the most important things to become wise.

And yet, it's very hard to come up with a definition that people will agree with. And there's so many different definitions floating around. And so that intrigued me. And so I started doing analysis of different definitions. And I ended up coming up with a bunch of different definitions, each inspired by different thinkers or different ways of looking at the problem.

So I'll just mention three of them. The first is this idea of wisdom as self-consistency, and this one was inspired by the work of Justin Chouville and Elliot McCurnen. So the idea here is that to be wise is to have a consistency between the key elements yourself. So, consistently between your values, your beliefs and your actions. And so an example would be, imagine that you value being honest, but you're being dishonest, right? Well, immediately that's a,

your values are not aligned with your actions, right? So you're not being consistent, you're not being wise. Or imagine that you believe you should, you'd be best if you became a doctor, but you're actually pursuing being a lawyer, right? So there, that is actually a conflict, again, between your beliefs this time and your actions. And so those three pieces, all being in alignment,

is that's kind of the first idea. Any reaction to that one? That feels not too dissimilar to me. Values, beliefs, actions, as like intention, action outcome. I suppose the one thing that's missing there would be the outcome. And I think that that's a very important part because what you want from any wisdom philosophy is to be able to accurately predict the impact of the things that you're going to do. I think that's super, super important and I

think that an awful lot of wisdom comes down to being able to achieve the ends that you meant to and to know the ends that you mean to get to. Yeah, it's a great point. And actually, that's really tied into the second edition of wisdom, which I, which I, I call wisdom as causal control. And this is inspired by work of Verveki and Ferraro. Good guy, John Verveki being on the podcast. He's a modern wisdom alumni. Oh nice.

I don't know if you would agree with this. But it's inspired by his work. So it's this idea that wisdom is about both the ability and the propensity to consider the complex situation that you're in. And then through your understanding of yourself, the world and other people produce what are on average beneficial outcomes, right? So there's a swirl of like complexity, but you kind of sift through that and you say, ah, if you take this action, this complex situation on average, that will lead to good outcomes. And it has to be on average because the world's probabilistic, right? There's no way, for example, at poker, to win every time, the best you can do is win on average. And so much of life is like that.

So, yeah, to me, that sort of captures that second piece that you were actually referring to. 100%. Wisdom is knowledge multiplied by goodness. What's that? Yeah, so this is sort of, sometimes you'll hear people say things like wisdom is, you know, knowledge times altruism or knowledge times goodness, right? And so I thought about that a bunch. And I was like, okay, there may be something to that. And so, right? And so I thought about that a bunch and I was like, okay, there may be something to that. And so first of all, I think we can say that, like, knowledge is an element of wisdom, right? I think most people would say, if you know, if you don't have any knowledge, like it's hard to be wise, right? At the same time, being good

it seems to be an element of wisdom, right? If you are totally evil or you're totally self-serving, it seems to be strange to call you wise. And so we could say, okay, wisdom seems to be related to these two things, knowledge and goodness, right? But how is it related to those two things? Is it more like a sum of those two things? Well, if we're here, some of those two things, then you could still get a high wisdom score

by being really knowledgeable if you're even if you were super evil. And that doesn't seem right. You're using all your knowledge as to, you know, serve yourself or something. Or you could get a really good wisdom score score by being really a good person but knowing nothing being completely ingr that doesn't seem right either. So it seems like it's more like a product like multiplying knowledge

and goodness together and the reason is because zero times anything is zero right. So if you zero knowledge no matter how good you are you still get a zero wisdom. And even if you're not point not point nine you're less knowledgeable your wisdom is less than your knowledge if you're bad. Or if you're not, it could be. Exactly. So they multiply together and you actually need both and then they kind of like complement each other. And so that's, that's this third idea,

kind of an intuitive notion of wisdom that I like. It's interesting that there's this sort of benevolence to wisdom, right? It's axiomatically from first principles leaves the world in a better place than it was when it found it. That there is, I think that the goodness part is pretty important.

Maybe there's an element of assumption that sufficient understanding of intention and action would fold goodness in like axiomatically, like this is something that should be a part of any sufficiently knowledgeable system, they should also arrive at goodness. And although I'm sure that there's some philosophical theory that literally would say that that may be the way that it works functionally, I don't think it is. Like you have to design this for the idiot apes that are going to use it.

And I think that goodness is sufficiently important that it bears adding it in as another factor of your wisdom equation. All right, we've... Oh, I just wanna say that's such an interesting point. And this is something I actually often debate with my guests on the clear thing podcast, where they'll make an argument that goodness

is this fundamental force in the universe or like, is an objective thing? And I'm like, no, no, no, it's like a value on values. And so I think there's two ways to arise at this goodness piece. One is to say objectively, like if you're sufficiently intelligent, you'll figure out that being good is like, is objectively right.

And the other way to get it, which is more the way I take, is like, actually, if you reflect on your values, almost everyone cares about being good in different ways, whether it's being honest or reducing suffering or, you know, helping your loved ones. And so, goodness comes about because our values, almost all of us have values that involve goodness. Interesting. So do you think, on average, that most of the people who end up doing evil things are doing that because of an instrumental value? Ah, that's such a good question. There are a bunch of different types of evil. So one type of evil is what I call philosophical disorder. A philosophical disorder is when you deeply believe something important that is both false and harmful to believe.

And so take an example of someone who joins a cult and they become convinced by the cult leader that they should go blob a building, right? That is someone doing evil from the philosophical disorder. They have a false, harmful belief, they're executing. But that person might be like really kind and altruistic, and I think they're saving the world, right? That is an extremely different type of evil than someone who is evil because they only care about their own interests.

They literally are completely indifferent to the interests of all of their people other than themselves. And while there are some people like that, there are some people that only care about their own interests, completely indifferent to the interests of anyone else other than themselves, they're actually extremely rare. They're extremely rare. And I think they're actually most evil in the world. It's not caused by that kind of person,

it's not so much, even though you might think that it would be. Yeah, my friend Gwinda, really smart guy from the UK, has a bunch of different things about evil. He says, the world's few evil people cannot enact their plans without the world's many stupid ones. Therefore, stupidity is a far greater threat than evilness. And I think that in some regards, that's quite true. There's another insight about how the world has very few

original thinkers and most people end up being kind of marionetted by whatever their favorite influencer does so you get this kind of mimetic echo cascade thing going on. But yeah, I would agree. If you look at most of the super, super evil people from history, if you actually look at what they were trying to do, they were driven by what they saw as a benevolent goal, the extenalities of the path that they took to achieve that goal, ended up in massive amounts of suffering and reprehensible behavior. But I don't know, I don't know how many people

live on this earth who are like from first principles, oh, they're evil, like intrinsically, they value harming people and causing suffering and discomfort and pain and all this sort of stuff. It's mostly, I am on a righteous path. I have, it's the like Thanos, right? It all roads lead back to Thanos. Like I have an outcome I believe is worthwhile,

but the root to get there is one that many other people would say is evil. Well, you know, it's fascinating. So we ran this study on intrinsic values and we had people, we taught people what they were and then we had them submit what they thought they were. And we got 3000 submissions. We looked through them, we dupl duplicate them, we categorized them.

I don't think there was a single person in there that had intrinsic value of harming other people, right? So I'm not saying it's literally impossible. There might be some people out there that actually their values are harming others. But I think actually in practice, the most evil, fundamental evil people is just that they don't have intrinsic values of helping others, or, you know, but they're, I think even them, they like, they don't have an intrinsic value of harming others, which, you know, honestly, thankfully, right? Like, think about how bad that would be. And it's fascinating because if you watch cartoons or movies about evil, it's

almost always the case that they actually have a, seem to have a value of harm, which is bizarre. But why do we come up with fictional worlds that have nothing to do with reality? Well, it's because it simplifies it down, right? That being said, I was thinking about Lion King. You know, the Lion King, the Mufasa and Skar, the reason that Skar is such a dick is, he wants the control of Pride Rock, right?

He wants to take that. But that being said, there's, you know, there's many all of the evil guys throughout most of the Avengers except the Thanos, actually, who it makes for like an interest. He's another interesting case, right? Like he's got this what he sees as a benevolent goal, but isn't in the end. But yeah, so many of the cartoon movie supervillains just have, oh, he's just the bad guy, right? One of my friends. Yeah, one of my friends is doing this really interesting study at the moment to do with

physical attractiveness and perceived goodness. So like the goodness of a person. And if you look at, you know, many stories, popular culture, the bad person has some form of physical disfigurement, right? It's like a physical manifestation of this malignant internal state of philosophy. And yeah, he's going to run this facial analysis to like, you've psych-based facial analysis study, which I think will be really interesting. Well, that's really interesting. I hope he finds that there's no correlation to people.

It's not going to happen. It's something that we can be an uncomfortable realization. I feel like one of the form of prejudice that is very accepted and decided, and I think should be much less accepted is people basically shitting on unattractive people like I just think that's you know nobody chooses to have You know, if you think about how arbitrate a little bumps in our faces are the determine whether we're good looking versus average versus But even with that it's it's not just the shitting on the people who are not good looking there is the Even if you don't actively shit on the person that are not good-looking. There is the, even if you don't actively shit on the person that isn't good-looking, by giving benefits to the person that is good-looking, it is,

by omission rather than commission, still damaging the person that isn't. And much as that degree of egalitarianism in the world would be maybe useful. I think it is, we're way too evolution of locked in for that. All right, we've got three more. Wisdom as a virtue, what's that? Ah, wisdom as virtue. So this is the idea that being wise is about demonstrating these certain virtues,

you know, the virtue of courage, the virtue of honesty, the virtue of kindness. And so I think this is like kind of a very traditional view of wisdom. It so I think this is kind of a very traditional view of wisdom. It's like about who you are as a person, what you manifest rather than sort of a more intellectual view of wisdom. And what do you think about this?

Yeah, this is like the medieval hero story. This is like Shrek wisdom, right? Like you're going to do the thing. Yeah, I'm looking at some of the things here. Factual knowledge, self-knowledge and understanding, first-hand experienced, common sense, compassion, altruism, impartiality, non-attachment, objectivity, epistemic humility, courage.

Yeah, this is definitely like the tradcon side of wisdom. I wonder whether this would be folded into the goodness part of your wisdom equation. Maybe not, you know, like is impartiality non-attachment courage? Like is courage a part of goodness? It's probably not. You would say that most people who are courageous are good, but not all people that are good are courageous. So yeah, I think this is probably useful. And you do need to pay a little bit of lip service to the vestigial wisdom world. There's a nod to what it was and maybe tradition, what it would have been considered. Right. I think that's right. And you can also think of it as a bit of a recipe. Because if you take this really abstract

definition of like, you know, looking at all the complex causes and picking out the eye action to take, like, okay, how the hell do you do that? It's like, well, maybe you become the kind of person that is courageous so that you can take the right action, whereas other people won't take the right action and you become the kind of person that's, you know, unbiased or is there, so that you can like evaluate things, you know, even handily and so on. So it's a little bit of like, who do you become in order to be able to do that? Which I think can be a useful way of thinking about things.

Awesome. Okay. Wisdom as search. Yeah. So these are one of the more abstract ones. So it's basically about exploring the essential truths about life, the cause and effective things, and then basically applying these insights to both theoretical and real life situations. And so it's like, think of it as like, you're like thinking about the big questions, the important questions. You're not focused on the, you know, unimportant things. You're focused on the big things.

And then you search to actually find those answers. And then once you get those answers, you use them. You apply them as tools. And so I think the emphasis of this definition of wisdom is it's really more of like wisdom as a process that you go through, rather than like a thing that you do. Right, wisdom is a process rather than a thing that you do.

Well, right. So it's not like, oh, you have a difficult decision. And now you suddenly act wise. It's no, you know, it's like wisdom is like the fact that you've spent your whole life pursuing the answers to the big things and then like, you know, figuring out how to incorporate them. Right, yeah.

Yeah, it almost sort of speaks to the compounding effect of wisdom. This may be plays into the elder, druid style person sat around the campfire, bestowing his stories on the elder, druid, style person sat around the campfire, bestowing his stories on the youth, so to speak, that it's this accumulated thing that you continue to pick up throughout your life. Exactly.

By the way, I think it's just something about your audience, that you want me to go through all these definitions, because I was like, there's no way we're going to get to more than three of these. You do not know this audience. If we stopped now, if we stopped now and only did five of the six, it would be a barrage of very, very bad comments. So the final one, wisdom as perspective. Okay. So this is about the idea of viewing things from multiple vantage points. I don't know if you've ever like had a guest talk about like spiral dynamics

or this kind of idea. No, I really want to get into it. Do you know anyone that's like super, super good at communicating spiral dynamics? Well, I'm happy to tell you my take on it, but I don't know. No, I don't know, I don't know who the the best expert to talk on it. This is a what to say. Transcendent include, right? I don't know that the name doesn't ring about. There are actually a bunch of people who've written in different ways about these related concepts. Yeah. Okay, interesting. Is it not Ken Wilba? Is Ken Wilba like a big part?

Yeah, that is. Yeah, he's one of the founders that connects to him. Good. Okay. Anyway. So wisdom is perspective, spiral dynamics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this idea and spiral dynamics of sort of these, they sometimes call them different colors

of like ways of seeing the world, like the way of seeing the world when you're like alone self, trying to survive versus a small tribe and so on. And as you get seeing the world, that the way of seeing the world when you're alone self, trying to survive versus a small tribe, and so on. And as you get near the top, I think it's often it's the second to last stage. There's this stage where you see all the stages below. You see all the other ways of looking at the world

that have come before, whether you're in a tribe or a big civilization or an individual, alone in the woods. And then you incorporate all of them in your worldview and you kind of see the strengths and the weaknesses of each of them. So this is wisdom as perspective. It's like you're able to take on every lens and kind of triangulate between all of them.

And I think that's an interesting take. It's something that I aspire to try to do. I don't know the captors of all of wisdom, but I think it captures an of an interesting piece of it. Hmm. Yeah. What would what would wisdom be like if you didn't have wisdom as perspective as one of the arms of this six-legged octopus? Yeah. I think that I think, you know, the danger there is that like you're stuck in one perspective, right? Like maybe it's a wise perspective, but then you can't step outside of it, right?

Whereas like, wisdom as perspective is like, you can see the strengths of weaknesses of every way of looking at this problem. And then you can balance them and you can like take the good bits and you can switch between them and. It's a, it did, it does not surprise me that people who want to try and be wise in life have a nightmare. I mean, look at the six incredibly high hurdles that you've just decided to define for how everybody needs to... Okay, you want to be wise.

Well, here is this fucking gauntlet of hell that you need to go through. But one of the tactical ways to do this, certainly from my life, a lot of the things that you go through that are, to me, intrinsically rewarding. Knowledge, causal control, self-consistency, when I haven't had these things in my life, have been some of the times that I've felt the worst about myself. When I haven't felt like I've been able to enact change, when I've had an external locus of control, when I'm not self-consistent, my actions and my intentions and my beliefs and my values and then my outcomes also. They're all over the place. Like my knowledge, when I'm not increasing my knowledge,

I'm not learning more. If I even increase my knowledge, but use it in a manipulative way, I learn neuro-linguistic programming, but do it to distract someone while I steal a bar of chocolate or something like that. That wouldn't feel particularly good to me. And then, yeah, wisdom is a virtue as well.

I've really enjoyed this sort of accumulation, cumulative effect over time. So I think wisdom just as a word, presuming that people have the right set of definitions of it, is something that's probably pretty easy to actually encourage yourself to chase down, because the process at each single step of the way makes you feel pretty good about yourself. It makes your life better and it makes the world around you better too. It's like pretty a universal panacea for most problems. Yeah, I think it's definitely gratifying to pursue these. So it doesn't have to be grueling. Of course, you're never going gonna achieve these things, right?

It's an impossibility. These are ideals to aspire to. And if you do well, I'm even one of these definitions. I think you're doing great. So I think, trending says that all six definitions seems, yeah, that's a lot.

Oh yeah. Spencer Greenberg, ladies and gentlemen, Spencer, I'm so glad that we got introduced, man. We got linked up by mutual friend, William McCaskill. And he said, I know that you guys are going to get on well. Super, super impressed and your website is awesome. There's tons and tons of resources on there. So why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the things that you're doing. Thank you so much for having me on a really, really great follow. This was such a fun conversation.

So if you want to hear more from me, I have a podcast called the Clear Thinking Podcast. We also have a website clearthing.org. We have over 70 completely free tools you can use and we offer as a public service for measuring your intrinsic values to help you for healthy habits with our daily ritual tool and you know 68 others. So we'd love for you to check it out. Hell yeah, Spencer, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Offends, yeah, oh, yeah, offends.