Modern Wisdom - #978 - Spencer Greenberg - How Much Does IQ Matter?

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

Spencer Greenberg is a mathematician, founder, CEO & creator of ClearerThinking.org How much does IQ really matter? Most of us have met people on both ends of the spectrum and wondered where we stand and what that means for our future. But is IQ truly fixed, or can it be shaped in some very surprising ways? Expect to learn how much IQ matters in all areas of your life, what the pubic misunderstands about IQ, if we should be treating intelligence more like a skill than an inherent trait, why the obsession with IQ might just be a form of intellectual status-signaling, why imposter syndrome is shockingly common and some counterintuitive benefits to imposter syndrome, if traits like narcissism or sociopathy can ever be adaptive or useful, the most common misinterpretations of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and much more… Sponsors: See me on tour in America: ⁠https://chriswilliamson.live⁠ See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get 60% off an annual plan of Incogni at https:/incogni.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) The Intelligence Test (3:25) What is IQ? (7:19) The Main Claims Around IQ (12:35) How Important is IQ? (17:50) More Claims Around IQ (19:52) Can a High IQ Be a Disadvantage? (22:25) Are IQ and Happiness Correlated? (35:20) What Does the Future of IQ Research Look Like? (36:31) - Deep Dive into Imposter Syndrome (55:07) Re-examining the Dunning-Kruger Effect (01:02:22) Deciding Your Own Attractiveness Level (01:06:14) Misunderstandings About Personality Disorders (01:16:56) The Differences Between Sociopaths and Psychopaths (01:17:56) Are Narcissism and Sociopathy Adaptive Traits? (01:23:27) Are We Over-Pathologizing Unpleasant People? (01:25:02) Find Out More About Spencer Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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

What was this study you did on intelligence? Yeah, so some people say that IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle, and other people think it fully captures everything about your intelligence and says who you are as a person fundamentally. And as you probably know, there was a big replication crisis in social science where many studies failed to replicate. And so we thought, hey, we can do our part by trying to replicate a lot of claims about IQ and intelligence. So we recruited over 3,000 people. We implemented 62 distinct intelligence tasks, which includes everything from like memorization, puzzle solving, math problems, spelling, reaction time. So of everything you could possibly think about that you could do online automatically. And then we tested about 40 different claims that are made about intelligence and we checked if they held up.

Right. Yeah, it is intelligence is kind of like the barbell chalk and cheese. It's the, how do you say? It's like the cognitive Rorschach test. It's like how you see it kind of tells me probably quite a lot about your priors coming into it. You're right. It's either the fundamental underpinning that explains all of the outcomes that you're going to get in life, or it is a Nazi-ish policy that never had any basis in science and should be totally disbanded. Yeah, it's pretty wild.

And so the question is, yeah, what's really true about it? To what extent is academia right about it? to what extent of the late public write about it, and so we explored a bunch of those questions. Why do you think, even before we get into that, why do you think it's so contentious? Yeah, I think it's a few things. One, it does have a horrendous history.

It was used, for example, like the idea of IQ or measuring intelligence was used for forced sterilization, so that's pretty horrible. I mean, the Nazis got into really some evil stuff around, you know, thinking about how intelligent people are and murdering people on that basis. So I think that's part of it. I think another thing is, you know, everyone kind of thinks it's like, yeah, it's good to be organized.

But if someone says you're disorganized, it doesn't feel like it cuts to the bone, like, of who you are as a human, or it doesn't make you subhuman. But I think some people feel this about intelligence. If you're told you're unintelligent, that it's sort of like says you're bad and have a fundamental way or you're lesser. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, and I think, so I think that it feels different. That's interesting. Intelligence is very close to our sense of self in a way that the cleanliness of our cubby. or like our obsessiveness or something isn't quite so much.

Yeah, and it's really interesting because having run many different studies on human psychology, we find there are some things people can report accurately about themselves, and there's some things they can't. Like, for example, if you ask people how organized they are, they're pretty accurate, actually. But if you ask people, are you intelligent? Not so accurate. Like, it's hard for people to self-assess because sort of everyone has to believe that they're intelligent, right?

Or if you ask people how rational they are, it's not something they can. can self-assess. And so actually one kind of just funny finding, we asked people to estimate their own IQ and then our study was able to get an accurate estimate of their IQ. And guess how related those two things are? Were people 50% right? Yeah, that's, yeah, it turns out not even, right? The correlation is about 0.23. So yeah, people don't have a very accurate assessment. It's better than total random guessing, but not a very accurate assessment of their own intelligences, at least as far IQ is concerned. Okay, let's get into the different claims about IQ, which ones held up, which ones totally fell apart under scrutiny? Totally. Well, should we talk about what IQ is maybe?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's explain that. Like, what is this thing, IQ, right? Because, you know, if you really, if you really want to say, well, IQ is intelligence, well, is that really the case, like theoretically? And so we implemented these 62 distinct intelligence tasks, or each one's totally different. And then one simple question we can ask is, suppose you do well at one of the tasks, does it make you more likely to do it well at the others? And it turns out it's almost always the case that being better at one makes you more likely at the others, almost throughout all the different 62 intelligence tasks. And this is a very strange finding. Like this was a finding that we replicated that was occurred early on in the history of IQ. And it's not obvious that it would

be the case. Like, for example, you can imagine a world where being good at math that says nothing about how good you are, let's say, vocabulary or spelling, right? But that's not the world we live in. There's something funny that's going on about humans where being good at one task makes you more likely to be good at the other tasks. And then IQ is kind of built on this observation. The idea of IQ is it's a measurement of this thing they call G, which stands for general intelligence, which is essentially what intelligence tasks have in common. So it's kind of the common stuff so that if you can measure G using IQ, then you have a sense of how will people, will people do on intelligence tasks in general.

How much truth is there in saying that G or IQ might be able to predict your ability to complete other tasks that measure the same thing, but it is not predictive of anything as soon as you step outside of the classroom, so to speak. Yeah, so that's a really good question. That's part of why we wanted to develop a really wide range of intelligence tasks. So we didn't take a strong view on, well, what is intelligence? We said, let's just implement everything we can kind of measure that could be reasonably said to be related to intelligence, that we can do quickly on a computer. And so we find that almost all of them are, to at least some extent, predicted by IQ, right?

However, what about things like you go, you go study a small-scale culture where they do hunter-gathering activities, you know, is tracking an animal or being really good at, like, planting and picking, you know, the best fruit? Is that really that cute? I think we don't really know, right? So I think when you get to that kind of stuff, it's far enough away from what we're measuring on a computer that's hard to say. Or take a phenomenal dancer that just has an incredible sense of where their body is and they can position it in exactly the way they have in their mind. Is that really the IQ? I don't know. It's hard to measure it in a laboratory. So I don't think we can say that IQ is connected to every single thing that you might say involves intelligence, but I would say it's connected to almost everything you can measure in a lab that can quickly measure a lab that connects to intelligence. I would imagine as well in a increasingly brain-based as opposed to a brawn-based economy, more of our life outside of the lab is actually going to look like tests inside of the lab.

Yeah, and I think a lot of it depends on sort of what career trajectory you're on, right? If you're a white-collar worker, like, I think that's going to be true. If you know, if you work, you know, building infrastructure physically, then, you know, maybe it's not true. So, you know, right there I think is actually a key thing to note. that IQ tends to predictability at certain kinds of things, and those kinds of things are much more relevant for some people's lives and other people's lives. Yeah, so IQ is more predictive for certain people than it is for others.

Yeah, and actually you find that. If you look at, so IQ predicts job performance across a wide range of jobs. But if you look at what jobs it predicts job performance better, it turns out it's these higher complexity, more analytical type jobs that does a better job of predicting rather than sort of, maybe more physical jobs or jobs that involve less sort of analytical thinking. Okay. What were the sort of tests that you did, this wide-ranging set of assessments? What did that consist of?

Yeah, so things like memorization, solving puzzles, guessing the next symbol in a sequence, like Ravens Matrixes, the famous one, spelling, vocabulary. We even had one on reaction time, where we had a green square and we said, as soon as it turns red, click. And literally, IQ is somewhat predictive of how quickly you click, which is kind of nuts. But funnily enough, IQ had a negative predictive ability with how fast people thought they would be at clicking. So people actually with higher IQs thought they had lower reaction times, even though they had somewhat better reaction times. Oh, that's interesting.

Well, yeah, I guess we can get into the implications of people's self-perceived expectation. and then what actually happened. Talk to me about the main claims around IQ. What were the ones, I mean, even going in, you must have had an idea where you thought, I feel like this is probably going to get replication crisis or there was stuff that was more surprising. Yeah, so we weren't sure because, you know,

in some areas of social science, there's been a really bad replication crisis where maybe like 40% of the papers just don't hold up if you redo the experiment. That's pretty bad. Other areas, it's more solid. Like in cognitive psychology, where they're like having you look at like lines

on a screen and like measuring really low level brain function, that stuff tends to hold up better. So, you know, where is IQ on that range? I would say overall, just like taking a bird's eye view, we did replicate a lot of the academic findings, but not necessarily every single one of them. But I think one of the sort of key things that's really important to understand about IQ is that if you look at these 62 intelligence tasks, IQ captured about 40% of the variation in people's ability. In other words, you could, you could guess about 40% of how people would do, loosely speaking, based on their IQ, but that leaves 60%, which is really interesting. And some of that 60% is just random noise, right?

Like, you know, what side of the bed you woke up on that morning? Or did you misread the question? Right? There's random noise in there. But there is a big chunk that IQ's not explaining. The interesting thing about that big chunk is not explaining is it's idiosyncratic. It really depends on which task you're doing. So, for example, it's often perceived that people who are good at math are not good at verbal stuff and vice versa.

You know, there's like the journalist versus scientists. The shape rotator versus the word. So exactly, and they're kind of at odds with each other. It turns out being a word cell is actually positively correct with your shape. Right. But interestingly enough, if you control for IQ, you take people the same IQ, some of them are better at word stuff and some are better at math stuff. And that's part of what's in that missing 60%.

And so the mental model I like to use for this, I think is really helpful, is to think about three things. There's IQ, which is your ability at the things that intelligence has to have in common. then there's your idiosyncratic aptitudes. Like, you might be more of a math person or more of a word person, even compared to people of your own IQ. And for me, for example, I did my PhD math. Like, I'm definitely a math person.

You give me a word scramble, and I'm like, I have no idea. I'll start moving letters one by one trying to, you know, it's just ridiculous. I'm terrible at word scrambles, right? And then the third thing, and this is really, really important, is skills. And skills are things we develop by practice. And skills can also increase our intent. intelligence in a meaningful sense. So take, for example, someone who has never played chess before, all they know is the rules and they have 140 IQ and pit them against them with 100 IQ who's played 10,000

hours. And who's going to win that chess match? I mean, clearly the person with 100 IQ is with 10,000 hours of experience is going to absolutely wipe the floor with the higher IQ person. It's not even a question. And that's because they develop the skill. And so if you think about, if you want a mental model of being good at stuff, you've got your IQ, you've got your idiosyncratic abilities, which are, you know, you might be better at certain things than other things, which is probably based on accommodation of genetics and also maybe your early in childhood environment and things like that.

And then you've got your skills that you can get good at anything you want. And the really crazy thing in the IQ literature is that we know lots of ways that people get their IQ lowered. You know, you take too many head blows that will lower your IQ. You get lead poisoning as a child, you know, if you live with like lead paint. You get malnutrition as a child. They will lower your IQ. Nobody's really figured out good way to raise your IQ, which is kind of shocking.

Do you think there is any? Well, I think that it's theoretically possible. I don't think we know any good ways to do it. But I think there's something that makes that much less depressing than it sounds. Because it sounds depressing, right? You start at a number and it can only be subtracted from. Yeah. But here's the really fascinating thing.

So what would it mean to raise your IQ? Well, it would mean, like, let's say on our 62 intelligence task, you would mean that if you, let's say, practice one of those tasks, you'd get better at a bunch of the others or all of the others, right? As opposed to getting better at the specific one, which would be skill-based. Exactly. So here's the reality.

Nobody really knows how to raise your IQ, but you can get good at anything you want. You can improve your skill. So in a weird way, it doesn't matter. If you want to get good at something, go practice it, develop a training routine, you will get better at it. Okay, maybe it won't generalize everything else.

You know, it would be nice if we lived in that world or generalized everything else, but you can get good at anything. And so I think that that is sort of what saves it. It makes it not so depressing. Okay. So do you come to think of IQ as foundational or fundamental in some way,

does it create a window or a bracket within which people's capacities sort of sit? It certainly seems, and yeah, I think both of us have to be diplomatic when talking about IQ, given it's fetid past. But the rubber's going to meet the road eventually. Just how important is IQ, I guess is my question. Yeah, so I think there's a couple ways to answer this. So one way is say, well, it explains about 40% of the variation to people's ability at tasks. Okay, 40%.

That's a big chunk, but it's far from everything, right? skill and individual aptitudes are going to also play a big role, right? So that's one thing to think about. Another thing you could ask is, to what extent does it predict outcomes? And this is one of our results that most surprised me than I've never seen anywhere else, is we actually pit ITIQ against personality and said, if you take into account someone's personality traits, it's a big five personality, which is five traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeables, and neuroticism, you take those five traits, you try to predict outcomes,

and you also try to predict outcomes with IQ, which actually wins, which is more predictive. What would you guess? I would guess IQ. Yeah. So I actually recently launched a YouTube channel, and we made a video about this, IQ versus personality. The shocking thing to me was actually personality won on almost every one of the predictions, or it tied IQ. I don't think it lost in a single one. So whether it's GPA or income or education level, your personality actually mattered more overall, which is pretty fascinating, I think.

Why? What's the mechanism by which personality is beating IQ? I think it's hard to say. I mean, you could think about it in individual cases, right? Like, take something like education. Well, clearly having a higher IQ is going to make it easier for you perform well in school. But you know what else is going to make it you perform well in school? Conscientiousness. If you're organized, you're a little bit perfectionist, like we're not too perfectionist. Like, you know, you always go to your classes on time, et cetera, versus the really, you know, smart person who just loaves around and doesn't try, right? consciousness matters a lot. Also, neuroticism can be disabling, right? If you have really terrible anxiety, really terrible depression, it's going to make it hard to study potentially, be distracting. So, you know, I think we take these five personality forces together. They actually account for quite a lot.

Does this not just pass the book to another area that is relatively immaliable, given that people are, I don't know. know how much people can change their personalities. I had David Robson on talking about a book of his, which was how much you can change your personality. And the answer was like a bit, but not exclusively. So is this any more hope inspiring or does it simply sort of hedge against IQ being all that matters? Well, you know, it's interesting.

I think there's a lot of random dice that get rolled when you're born. and not just in your genetics but also your early childhood experiences, things like that. And I think we have to accept that, you know, there's a lot of a lot of dice that get rolled and they can really affect your life in a lot of ways, right? I think an interesting analogy is like with basketball, like, could you be like a five-foot-10 basketball player? Like, the answer is yes, but it's going to be a lot harder, right? And, you know, they exist, but if you're, you know, six foot five, that's going to help

you a lot. And I think it's like that. Like IQ and personality, they don't fully determine what will happen to you, but they make something's harder and they make something's easier. But on the topic of changing personality, there's actually, I think there's a lot of room to kind of move things there. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to change your sort of fundamental core in nature, but you can change a lot of your behaviors that give you a lot of the benefits. For example, think conscientiousness, right? So systems like getting things done, that can sometimes take someone who's like just terrible at being

organized and give them a system. And as long as they follow the system, actually, they can behave like a person who's much more consciousness. Oh, yeah, that's interesting. I suppose, you know, somebody who's high in neuroticism but chooses to spend a lot of time in sunlight or around friends or contributing to a job that they mean that's meaningful to them. Well, that's really going to counter a lot of neuroticism. Somebody who is very low in neuroticism but spends all of their time on their own and not exercising and eating poorly is going to display the sort of traits that somebody who is higher in neuroticism would do. Absolutely. That's going to be a huge factor. And for neuroticism in particular, we actually have a lot of techniques that work pretty well, right? Like cognitive behavioral therapy has really good evidence for helping people with depression and anxiety. And so that's a good place to start. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to go from being a highly anxious person your whole life to not an anxious person. But yeah, it can really, it can actually reduce the symptoms quite a bit. But I think the behavioral thing is huge. I mean, there's even some interesting experiments where they get people who are introverted to say, just pretend to be extrovert and just be more social for a couple weeks. And often they get a,

a pickup in their mood. It doesn't apply to all introverts. I think some introverts just fundamentally don't have a desire for social activity, but I think some introverts, it's more around shyness or feeling socially awkward. And I think when it's more of that kind of stuff, just acting extroverted, you might get some of the boost as though you were an extrovert. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Jimshark and Skims and Allo and Newtonic.

And that is why I've partnered with them, because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, their best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared with other leading commerce platforms. And with shop pay, you can boost your conversions by up to 50%. You can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify. by going to the link in the description below and signing up for a $1 per month trial period or by heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. Okay. What about some of the other claims around IQ?

What were some of the ones that got decapitated and some of the ones that held up? Yeah. So one theory about IQ is Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences theory, which says they're like eight distinct types of intelligence. you know, things like mathematical, linguistic, you know, interpersonal, et cetera. And our data did not support that view. We couldn't test all of his claims or anything like that. But I would say it's not really consistent with that. We find this sort of almost everything is currently with almost everything else, right?

Whereas his theory is sort of like, there are these distinct brain regions that do these distinct things. And, you know, I don't think it's, I don't think it's so true. So that's one. We also had some, we had some funny ones that we replicated. So there was an active paper that claimed that people with lower IQs tend to have more pathological celebrity attitudes. So, like, they think that if you, like, meet your favorite celebrity, they're going to, like, really enjoy talking to you or, or, like, you're going to find that you and your favorite celebrity have all these deep hidden connections. And, yeah, we actually did find that lower IQ people do believe that. That's like, that's such a culturally unfortunate, like, inconvenient thing to find out.

Oh, the proletariat. They're working in the minds all day and then going home and dreaming about this person on reality TV that they're going to spend the rest of their life talking to about interesting things. It's like it's very cliche in a totally tragic sort of way. It's cliche. Yeah. Another kind of like fascinating one. So there was a paper that claimed if you make up nonsense, nonsense phrases like, you know, the destiny of darkness is everything or whatever that. people with higher IQ will be like, those are bullshit where people with lower IQ be more likely to be like, oh, that's profound. And we actually replicated that. Indeed, people with lower IQ

tend to find these nonsense statements more profound. Oh, that's interesting. What was some of the, or were there any disadvantages of higher IQ, was it predictive in some way of things that were usually undesirable? You know what's funny about that? So I ask a question.

of the week every week on my social media on Twitter and one of my questions the week was what do you think more intelligent people like are worse at or what disadvantages do they have and people have like all kinds of theories like you know so many different theories and the reality is like almost none of them hold up

like it's just a weird it's a weird thing like I would say the best evidence of what is bad about having a high IQ is you might be more like it to be near sighted and that's probably because of like behavior stuff like people you know maybe from their face in a book I don't know. I don't know exactly what it. Or you're saying it's screens. The other thing is

they may be more prone to loneliness, especially as children. Like I do think that there can be some sense of like, you know, if you're much higher a kid than people around you, it might be a little bit isolating when you're, but I think when people become adults, they like find people that they connect with. You can broaden your pool of people that you can hang out with and also find other high IQ freaks. Yeah, exactly. And you know what's actually has made the the field very confused for a long time. Like, there were a bunch of studies looking at MENSA and discovering all these negative things about having high IQ.

But it turns out there seemed to be, at least the evidence seems to suggest there's some kind of negative self-selection. Like, if you identify yourself as a high IQ person, that's probably really not a good sign. Like, just having high IQ is not a bad thing. But making that a major part of your identity, probably not a healthy way to live. I wonder whether that is negatively predictive of having. a high IQ as well. What did what did you find out that? What did you find out about people's

ability to self-assess compared with what came up in the data? Yeah, so people, yeah, so we replicated the general finding that people with hierarchy do believe they have hierarchy, but not very much. Like, there's a very, very low correlation. It's like a, I think it was about 0.23 in our study. So people were not

very good at self-assessing, but they were better than random chance. But I think, you know, I do want to just emphasize that IQ is very far from destiny, right? Like, you can develop any skills you want, you can keep getting better and better at them. IQ might make it harder. It's like going back to basketball analogy, right?

It's like heightened basketball. It can make it harder based on your starting IQ. But if you lean into your, you know, idiosyncratic aptitudes, the things you tend to be better at, and you develop your skills, you build a good training programs. You can get better sort of pretty much anything. So just, yeah, I really do want people to keep that in mind. Let's say that there was a way to improve the IQ of everybody. would that be the sort of thing

that on average is likely to improve life quality for all of the people who got it? Well, see, this is really fascinating. What do you think the relationship between IQ is and happiness or life satisfaction? Positive? You got it. It's got to be positive, right?

But it's not. It's insane. Oh, for fuck's sake. It's not. It's crazy. And it's almost unbelievable. Because it's like, well, surely, I acutiously at least give you more optionality, like, you know, open up more possibilities,

help you do better in school. It's crazy. It's not, it's not correlated with lifestyle section or happiness or moment-to-moment happiness. And this is our finding. It's also finding of others. And it's, honestly, I feel it as like this incredible mystery. I hope someone figures out. It suggests, to me, it suggests that there's something that higher IQ people are doing that, like, tend to make their life worse. And I don't know what that thing is, whether it's like they're taking on more stress or whatever. I'll tell you another, like, yeah. It's not, it's not correlated or it's negatively correlated. No correlation, zero correlation.

Right, okay, but if we assume that the objective life outcomes of somebody who's higher IQ is better, right? Yeah, well, they tend to have higher income, they don't have more... Socioeconomic, they're less likely to go to jail, they're more likely to complete college, they're less likely to be a single parent,

they're more likely to stay in a marriage. I've just made a ton of fucking predictions, many of which may be incorrect there, but I read it once on the internet. So even if it's not predictive at all in terms of life satisfaction and happiness, those things you would assume would be, right? Income poverty is associated with a lot of stresses that probably don't make people particularly happy, etc. 100%. Poverty is definitely associated with lower life satisfaction. So in order for it to be not correlated at all, you're having to compensate for some of,

of these better, quote, life outcomes that are predicted by IQ. So that actually kind of does suggest that there is some kind of break being applied, not just that you're coasting with it, not that it's totally impartial, but that it is actually applying some sort of negative multiplier to the life that you've got. Is that a fair way? Am I talking bollocks? Yeah. No, no, you're completely right.

There's something, and I say this is really a genuine mystery. Like, I do not think we as a society know the answer to this because everything points to the fact that it should give you a higher life satisfaction, higher happiness, but it doesn't. So there's some factor we're missing that kind of explains this. And hopefully one day we'll, someone figure it out. I'll tell you, like, even more baffling thing we found. We asked people to what extent they achieve their life goals, no correlation with IQ. Like, which, and it's especially odd because we know that people with higher IQs are,

Like better achieving certain kinds of goals, right? And so it suggests that people's view of like what is a good life or what are the goals that they have or, you know, it must change based on it must change. Yeah. And you know, and if you go back to thinking, well, what is happiness? Like on some fundamental level, it does relate to our expectations versus our reality and not just our reality. There may be something going on there about like the way that people plan their life might change on average when they have hierarchies that screws them over in some way. I had this idea called the curse of competence, which I think maybe kind of relates to this a little bit,

that basically if things tends to go well for you, that you set your sights very high, and also that if you are good at maybe only a small range of things, or maybe only one thing, if you only have a skill in one particular area, then your life options are constrained more by your capacity than they are by your ability to choose. And a sort of rationalist utilitarian approach would say,

well, the optionality is in favor of the person who has the competence, not the one that doesn't. But that's not the way that the human brain works. Like the paradox of choice suggests that you're actually less satisfied when you have more options as opposed to when you have fewer. So I kind of totally bro-scienced all of this together and thought, well, okay, that means that somebody who is maybe higher incompetence, you could probably, given how predictive G seems to be for lots of things, people, it's

robust and varied and allows you to have all of these different life paths open to you. I wonder whether this is one of probably tons of different areas that contributes to the lower life satisfaction, lower happiness thing. You're caught up in the optionality of life. You're unsure about which direction to go in. There is a switching, uh, cost and also just an executive functioning cost that you need to pay in order to be able to choose what it is that you want to do. The loss aversion, the sunk cost fallacy, all of this stuff plays in in a manner where it wouldn't if you had fewer options open to you. And it's a very unpopular opinion to hold that somehow having fewer options gives you a better quality

of life. But I think when you look at the way that the human sort of system works, that that does seem, I would guess that that would be predictive of what's going on. Yeah, it's really interesting. You can see it cutting both ways, right? Like, if you only have two options and they're both shitty, like, that's not, that's not you make a good life. But if you have like a thousand options, you have no idea which one to take and you're constantly second guessing it. That's also not a good life. So there's kind of this intermediate territory where it feels where like you want at least some good options, but you don't want endless options. And I mean, you know, people say this about online dating that it can actually,

actually make it more difficult to find a like a really good life partner because of the sort of the feeling of endless options can make you constantly second guess and not give people a fair shake. We're like, instead of going on that date and really being like, let me really take seriously the possibility that this could be my life partner and try that on just for a couple of days and then, you know, decide that they maybe are just always thinking about, you know, three other people they could go on a date with. Nexting, as it's known in in the world of online dating. What? Just to linger on, I'm fascinated by this life satisfaction happiness thing. Have you got any other mechanisms by which you can say this might be something that would contribute to it?

Yeah. So I mean, I've had policies, but they're speculative. So this is a home of bro scientist to save space for you here, Spencer. Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah. So one thing I suspect is that when people are higher IQ, they tend to question what they're told more and they're like question all the like the sort of beliefs of their society and that this might like create a sense of social isolation. And you see this for example

that there tends to be a negative correlation between IQ and religiosity. And that's not to, you know, dis-religion, but just to say that I think there might, you know, it's like religion, you know, if you fit well, if you're sort of like the median or modal religious member, like it might give you a sense of community, a sense of, you know, ease at, you know, life after death,

and might give you a sense that someone's, you know, look, or some great power is looking out for you. And then if you're like, you know, questioning all of that and being like, well, I don't know what to believe. And like, this seems like bullshit. Like that may actually make you less happy. I don't know, very speculative. Interesting. So IQ is a prophylactic against religion, but religion is a prophylactic against misery. And yeah, you're fighting against it.

It's an interesting one, man. I am. This episode is brought you by Incogni. If you've ever typed your name into Google and found your info on some weird website that you've never heard of, that's not a fluke. Data brokers and people search sites collect your personal information like your name, address, phone number, buying habits, your income, your medical history, and they sell it without your consent. And there are hundreds of them, which is why I partnered with Incogni. It finds these bad actors and gets your info removed from their databases automatically. You don't have to email anyone, fill out forms or jump through hoops. They handle the entire process for you. And keep

going as new brokers pop up. Best of all, you can cancel it any time, and they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it completely risk-free, use it for 29 days. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 60% discount on an annual plan by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to incogny.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I-com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. So the reason that I asked about if there was a a way that we could raise everybody's IQ. I've just become an advisor in a company that does embryo selection, gene polygenic

risk score embryo selection. And one of the things that they can get a little bit into is looking at raising IQ. Hey, here's a dashboard of 10 embryos that we've harvested. These three, you don't want those three. Here's seven that are left. Hey, this is better immune system, higher IQ, more externalizing behavior, etc., etc. I wonder, it seems to me inevitable that this technology is going to be used, especially to avoid what John Tooby talks about with gene decay. Are you familiar with that? No, it's a really interesting idea that basically, ancestrally, the selection pressures that were being applied to humans were so high that any suboptimal genetic mutations were selected out of the gene pool.

but as you get rid of that pressure, as you raise the floor basically with modern health care, a perfect and totally non-controversial example, which it took me a really long time to try and come up with one, is myopia. So people that need glasses, we have to assume on the Savannah 50,000 years ago, if your eyesight wasn't that good, you had a less high chance of survival and reproduction, right? Maybe by a little bit, maybe by a lot. It was less high. We know, we have glasses, right? It makes very little difference whether you're a child or whatever. I imagine it's maybe even not predictive at all of anything in life other than whether or not your kids have got. But what that means is over time, people with bad eyesight are more likely to have

kids who've got bad eyesight who more likely have kids have got bad eyesight because the deleterious mutations are being accumulated and not selected out. What you end up with is a what's called a crumbling genome, which is one that's kind of less robust over time because it's being buttressed and supported more by infrastructure. I absolutely do not think that people who need glasses should be killed at childbirth or at any point later in life. I think that would be a terrible idea. But I would guess anybody who needs glasses, I'm someone that did need glasses and I got laser eye surgery to fix it. If you could have told me that my parents would have been able to not have that be an issue for me at birth, and I'm aware that this isn't actually technically the way that it works.

you get into a much more sort of messy ethical territory because it's not about getting this same embryo and getting rid of the myopia. It would actually be choosing a different one. But, you know, for the purposes of not talking about whether the soul is transferable or not, I think we just need to stick with it here. My point being, I think that this is going to be used a lot. I think it's going to counter hopefully some of the mental health. Like we could see that. I certainly think that you could look at some of the negative outcomes we've got the predilections people have toward negative mental health and say, well, you know, if selection pressures were higher, somebody that had a lot of depression and anxiety, maybe there would be less likely to survive

and reproduce. I don't think that that should be the case either. I'm somebody that's suffered with depression and anxiety. I don't want to be like left out to dry because my tribe doesn't like me or whatever because I'm not a fun hang all the time in my 20s. But yeah, I just get the sense that this is going to happen more. And if we've got that, and IQ is one of the things that's going to be selected for, I think it's really important that conversations like this, that sort of look at IQ apolitically, that work out what it's good for, what it's not good for, where the limits of it lie. But to basically say that if you've got the choice to make, like, don't live in a house with lead paint, right? Like, that's a good idea. Don't get hit in the head too much. Don't

live in a house with lead paint, because your life outcomes are maybe not going to be that good. That being said, I'm not actually going to make that much of an impact on your happiness life satisfaction. Well, that's the irony. If the parent wants it going to be happy, don't select for IQ. And if you want to help the world, you know, maybe you select for altruism. Maybe that's, you know, that's what's more beneficial. That's a fascinating point.

Well, think about what, yeah, I'm just, that's such a great point. and one that, like, even for me, hasn't fully sunk in given I already forgot it, kind of. Most parents, if you ask parents, what is it that you want for your kids? So I just want them to be happy. All right. Well, you're left with a pretty difficult decision here, right? Because you know that life outcomes objectively on average in a modern capitalist meritocratic society are going to be better with higher IQ.

But maybe they're going to be a little bit more sad. So actually, what do you want? Yeah, I don't know if there's Morse out. I just think they're not necessarily happier. If you're trying to do it for the kid, you know, it's an interesting question. Are you trying to do it for the kid, or you're trying to do it for your idea of what you want your cell to be? And that's a different, somewhat different thing. What do you think the future of IQ research, IQ discussion looks like?

It's a good question. I mean, I do think there are a lot of things that are on solid footing. It was nice to see that because we have replicated studies in other areas. we see really big problems, right? We have a project called Transparent Replications, where when new papers come out in top psychology journals, we'll use a random number generator to pick some of them. We go take the study, we redo it from scratch,

rerun it on a new population, and see if it holds up and analyze it carefully, release a report, and we find a bunch of really serious problems. So at least it's good to see the science is, like, largely functioning properly. You know, a lot of stuff did seem to hold up. I would love to see more research on can you raise IQ?

Because that would be really, really cool if we could test lots and lots of different methods. Like, I'd love to see a study that, like, you know, gets 25 different researchers to come up with ideas of how you might train at something that helps you with everything, right? It improves your skill at everything. And, like, just test them all, you know? Because there's been some efforts in this,

and they haven't gone well, but it doesn't mean there's not some way to do it that we just haven't figured out yet. Fascinating stuff. All right, what have you learned about imposter syndrome? Yeah. Just one more last thing about IQ and intelligence. If you're interested in this topic, we released a giant report with all of our findings, all the 40 different claims we tested. It's on our website, clearerthinking.org. So you can check that out. Dude, everyone needs to check out all of the shit that you're doing. I love the podcast. I love the blog. I love your articles as well. Everything. I'll get late. Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. So the podcast is Clear Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. Every week I invite on someone I think is brilliant to discuss.

has four ideas. So yeah, I'd love to check that out. Cool. So yes, imposter syndrome. So this is something that we deep dived in. What we did is, this is kind of the style of our work a lot of times. We took all the different scales to measure imposter syndrome. We put them together. We ran a big study, testing them all simultaneously. And then we analyzed it to figure out sort of what are the core components of imposter syndrome and what is it related to. And so for those who don't know, imposter syndrome is basically when you're someone who's skilled, but you believe that all your success, it was just lucky and that you're somehow secretly a fraud and that you don't really have the skills of people think. And so we found, so in analyzing all these different ways

of, you know, kind of measuring imposter syndrome, two of the questions that were most predictive of it were when I achieve results that are praised, I worry that I might not be able to fulfill that person's expectations in the future. So if that's something that you resonate with, you might have imposter syndrome. And another one was, I'm afraid others will discover to the extent to which I lack acknowledge your ability. So you feel like you're keeping the secret of your incapability. So both of these, both of these are in relation to others. Yeah, because a lot of it is feeling like people's beliefs about you don't match the reality. Like, oh, people think I'm really successful, but like if they only knew or, you know, people think I'm talented, but if they only do,

there's an amazing quote from Tom Hanks. He said, let me just read this because it's so good. No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, how did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me? I mean, that's Tom Hanks, right? Yeah, Woody. So it's an interesting question around the higher someone's praise, the sense that that is now an obligation to meet it again in future. And I have to assume that that's because if you feel like your successes are by chance and that you don't have quite as much control or agency over the outcomes at this kind of a level, that every new success is not a cause for celebration. It's simply a higher bar to fall from next time.

Yeah, because if you go below that, oh, now you're, you know, you're in the climate. Oh, they're going to find out. And that plays into your, you're precisely the concern that you have. So that's very interesting, this sort of, and I imagine that it's going to be tied in with status. Did you see, was this at all, like, intracial competition, intersexual competition, state anxiety, was it related to that at all?

Well, interestingly enough, early on in the research, people believed that it was mostly women that had imposter syndrome, but then they discovered actually men have a ton of it too. So now it's the thought, that actually it's like maybe about equal in genders. It may be slightly more women, but like roughly equal.

And like it's hard to say who exactly has imposter syndrome for two reasons. One, because it depends on where you draw the line, right? Like you have to pick some point in the line where you say that person has imposter syndrome, but the person just below them doesn't. So that's arbitrary. And the other thing is there obviously can be people who genuinely just lack skill and people think they're skill than they're not, right? Yeah.

Maybe you have imposter syndrome or maybe you're, just shit at your job. Well, and the problem is that the people of imposterium think that they're that person. They're like, no, that's me. You're talking about me. Those other people have imposter syndrome. I just suck. Are you, right?

Fuck, that's interesting. Okay. So how common is imposter syndrome? Yeah. So you get a wide range of estimates. Typically, the estimates are 20% to 60%. I know it's an enormous range. But it depends on these factors, like, where do we drive the line?

And like, how do we know who really has it? But it's extremely common. Like ridiculously common. Right. even in high achieving groups like there have been studies on like medical students right and they're working their ass off and they they grind it so hard to get there and like a bunch of them have imposter syndrome too are high achieving people more likely to suffer with imposter syndrome than low achieving people that's a good question i don't know the answer to that someone should research

that yeah well i mean come on you're the guy uh okay what did you find out that we didn't already know what was interesting yeah so here's some here's some fascinating things people with a Bosch syndrome are more likely to perfectionism. And I suspect that what's going on here is that if you hold yourself to an unreasonable standard, it's going to create this gap between your performance and your perceived performance, right? Like, you know, if your standard is like you have to do everything perfectly or you suck, then you do things like, you know, you don't get perfect, but you do really well. And then you're like, I suck, right?

Outwardly, you've outperformed everybody else because of your inner anxiety. inwardly, you're never satisfied with your performance because of your unreasonable expectation. Exactly, exactly. And so they find it easy to dismiss their achievements because of the bar that they said is so unreasonably high. It also tends to be associated with thinking the mistakes are unacceptable, right? Like, you know, one thing I like to say is that I want to fail at more things than most people try it at their entire life. And, you know, it's like, because I think that's a healthy attitude towards like mistakes and fucking up and not succeeding. But it's challenging, right?

Like, it sucks to feel like you made a mistake. Like, it's painful and to fail really, really sucks, right? But the reality is, like, we're humans, where everyone's going to make mistakes all the time. But if you view mistakes as unacceptable, well, you're humans, you're going to make them. But that means you're going to end up thinking that you suck a lot more than you do. What are the key dimensions of imposter syndrome on your test? What was it measuring? Yeah.

So we found it's a pretty pure dimension by itself. which is, it's mainly around, like, this fear that people think more highly of you than they, than you really can justify, and you kind of worry about it and you worry you're a fraud, you're worried that they're going to find out, right? So that's kind of the key, like a pure dimension. But then it has this perfectionism link. We also found interestingly enough a procrastination link. People with imposter syndrome tend to, like, delay the tasks, not do them on time.

Oh, that makes total sense. Yeah. I think, and that also might my tie into perfectionism to some extent, too. But it is interesting how sometimes if we don't give ourselves time to do something, that it's easy to just kind of like give ourselves an excuse and feel less bad about it. Right? It's like, oh, well, yeah, I only did. I only put two hours.

I know I should have like started it last week. But then it's like, so I'm not really that bad a person because like, you know, I didn't do a good job just because I only spent two hours on it. Right. So there's these weird like ego games we play with ourselves to try to protect ourselves. Yeah, we've got a get out of jail free card because it's the same as somebody that gets into a relationship. and they're kind of committed, but kind of not committed, all that much. And if the relationship doesn't work, they think, well, you know,

it's not that much of a comment. I mean, it's not like I gave it my all in any case. Yeah, I mean, it, you know, it's interesting. If you are really intent on protecting your ego, it creates a lot of weird effects that can make your life worse, like behaviors where you try to protect your ego, instead of doing the thing you actually care about, like having a good relationship or, like, getting this project done, right?

Right. Yeah, okay. So the reason that you're dating is to find a life partner that makes you feel happy and fulfilled. But in the process of trying to not feel like somebody rejects you, sees you truly who you are and doesn't want you or you're not good enough or whatever it is, you behave in a manner which defeats the very thing that you were doing the dating to try and achieve because you don't show somebody all of you and you're not fully committed. Exactly. And I don't know if we're going to talk about narcissism later in this conversation, but yeah, like, is especially a problem for narcissistic people. But everyone, like, tries to protect their ego to some extent. We just differ in how much we try to do it. What do you make of this lean, slight lean, uh, towards females? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think that, that, um, women tend to be less self-confident. And, um, men, and so we, we, we, We did have this funny study where we asked people, out of 100 people of your age and gender, how many of them do you think you'd outperform at different skills, like surviving in a zombie apocalypse and dancing and kissing and, you know, cooking and all these kinds of things. And, you know, men tend to be a bit more overconfident.

Like, they tend to be a bit more, yeah, I could, you know, beat 70% of men at, you know, fighting or, you know, kissing or whatever, you know, not kissing men, because of women. But yeah, so I think, you know, and I think that's probably why people assume that women would have this more because, like, they tend to have lower self-esteem and less confidence. But funnily enough, it seems like unaposter syndrome, not necessarily. And, you know, and it's hard to know why that might be that it's more balanced. But it could come, it could be related to men often treat their work as sort of fundamentally their value. Right. So what they do in the marketplace is like, says who they are. Okay. So are there any counterintuitive benefits to imposter syndrome? Well, that's really interesting. I think a lot of times when we have these like damaging psychological beliefs, they're solving some kind of problem for us. It's often not worth it. But like they're often not random. And so a good example of this is like negative self-talk. You know, some people when they don't do a good job, they're like, you're a piece of shit. Like they're saying this to themselves in their mind. Like you're a piece of shit. You suck. And you like imagine how damaging that would be. like your father said that to you, you know, or your friend said that to you, like, how mean that would be. But it's like, well, why do people do that? And I think it's because at some point in their life, they learn that like, that squeezed a little bit more performance out of

them. And then they like, they're like stuck to that rule of like, oh, if I, if I whip myself into submission, then sometimes things go well for me. Exactly. I'll get myself to work harder and of course, of course there's an incredible cost and the cost is usually not worth it, right? But it's like they're often, I'm not going to say always, but often I think people are solving a problem with these dysfunctional psychological beliefs. It's just that they're creating more problems. And it, like, but then if you sort of challenge it and said, well, what if you just didn't treat yourself like shit? What if you didn't call yourself a dick all the time, you know? Like, they're like, on some level, they're like, but then I wouldn't be high, you know,

I wouldn't push myself. So they're like scared to let go of this dysfunctional measure. So you're like, you have to kind of give them another tool. It would be like, well, you could, instead of, don't get, don't just throw it away. Try this other tool for getting a good performance out of yourself, right? This episode is brought to you by Element. Summer hits different when you're actually hydrated. That tired, foggy, muscle, crampy feeling most people chalk up to heat or exhaustion. It might be electrolytes and plain water alone won't fix it, which is why Element is such a game changer.

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are heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Have you got any idea of potential interventions for imposter syndrome? Yeah, so we looked into this a bunch. So we made on Clear Thing.org, you can find our imposter syndrome assessment. You can go measure your imposter syndrome. But we also in it have a bunch of techniques you can try. I'll say that the evidence is not, there's not a huge amount of evidence,

but we look at the evidence and we teach you techniques that are at least somewhat evidence-based. So one of them is self-compassion. And I have to say, this tends to resonate a lot more with women than men in my experience. But self-compassion is actually like a pretty cool set of techniques for someone who tends to be pretty harsh on themselves. And it's basically, I mean, like at a core, it's saying, well, how would you treat it like someone you really care about when they're going through something difficult and just use that same energy towards yourself, right? Like, treat yourself with understanding, treat yourself with respect, treat yourself with kindness and empathy. And, you know, don't

Don't berate yourself, just like you wouldn't berate a loved one. Obviously, there's more to it than that. But I think that's like a good starting point. And I think for people that have a lot of negative self-talk, I think that's a really useful technique. Anything else? Yeah, another one is cognitive therapy can be useful here. So this basic tool from cognitive therapy where when you're feeling emotional, you tend

to have distortions in your thinking. This is actually one of the things that first made me obsessed with psychology. So I was reading a book on cognitive behavioral therapy. And it said it made this claim. Like when you're feeling intense negative emotions, your beliefs tend to get distorted in predictable ways. And I was like, what? Really? Is that true? So one time when I was feeling like emotional, I wrote down my thoughts. And I came back to them when I was in the neutral emotional state. And I was like, holy shit. That's exactly what happened. Psychopathic here. My beliefs were distorted by the intense emotion. And so cognitive therapy, I think, has this correct observation that that often, really often is the case. And so one cool technique is you write down your thoughts when you're feeling negative emotions. Like, let's say you're telling yourself that you're a fraud and everyone's going to find out.

You write down those thoughts. You come back to them in a neutral emotional state and you really try to evaluate the evidence. You say, what's the evidence for? What's the evidence against? And then once you've done that, you ask yourself, can I replace this thought with a thought that's at least as true and more helpful? So let's say the thought that you tend to have is like, I'm a fraud and everyone's going to find out, right? You can think, what is a belief that's just as true or more true?

But it's more helpful than that. Like, maybe it'll be a belief like, you know, I'm not good at everyone. everything, but I am really good at some things, right? So as an example of like a replacement thought. And then what you try to do is you try to practice that replacement thought. You try to notice when you're having that first thought and just immediately replace it with the second thought. Like just say the second thought to yourself in your head or out loud. And it can be actually quite a powerful technique. Is there any relationship between IQ and imposter syndrome? Oh, that's a good question. We didn't study yet, unfortunately.

Okay. So the reason that I ask it is I'm seeing at least one thread. between the two topics that we've spoken about so far, which is outwardly the outcomes... Oh, actually, let me ask you this first. Do people that have got imposter syndrome have better life outcomes? Yeah, unfortunately, I don't know that either. So I don't know much about the link between imposter syndrome and, like, objective achievement and their life outcomes.

I mean, it is linked, so I will say imposter syndrome is linked to more depression and anxiety. So on the emotional front, they have worse outcomes. But things like, whether they do better in school or things like that, I don't know. Yeah. So you can probably see where I'm going with this. Higher IQ, better objective life outcomes, the only way that we can be measured, which is externally, inwardly, these people seem to be, it's not correlated. But if life outcomes are better and that would be predictive of better life internally and there's a little bit of a sort of a minus multiplier going on there. And the same thing goes for the imposter syndrome.

I would guess that people with imposter syndrome, on average, are higher performers than people who don't have it. And I think that it's because of this sort of paranoia that they have about being found out, which will drive them to pay more attention, be more diligent, be more obsessive, compulsive, neurotic, work harder at these things in a desperate attempt to try and disprove their own unreasonable expectation for their standard that everybody else doesn't even know exists. So again, one of the questions I've been the most fascinated by, probably since I started this podcast, is what is the price that somebody pays in order to be a person that you admire? So high performers, high achievers, the ones that everybody seems to look up to, okay, well, that's what it's like externally, but what's their experience of life like internally? And I'm like a Pokemon card collector for just more little pieces of evidence that the way that somebody's life is going externally is not necessarily predictive of the things that you care about the most, which is peace of mind, life satisfaction, happiness, connection with others, you know, texture of their own existence as their head hits a pillow at night, that sort of stuff. and it seems like at least between the two things

that we've seen so far there's a bit of a corally going on there. I think that's really astute. Often to get sort of the tap of something, someone has to dedicate themselves fully to it. Obviously there's weird examples if someone gets lucky, but usually it's people who dedicate themselves fully.

If you look at Mr. Beast, could someone be more dedicated to getting views on YouTube? Like, he's probably the most obsessive person by getting views in the world and he also has the most views in the world. Like, it got to make sense. And I think a lot of times that obsessive focus really comes at a tremendous cost to other things.

Yeah. I mean, Mr. Beasts, I think it's even sad. I'm not the YouTuber. You want to be, right? And this has been my experience also, like, when I meet billionaires. Like, some of them are, like, you know, great people and, like, you know, seem like, you know, happy. But a bunch of them seem really like there's something wrong with them. On average, high performance are more miserable than normal people, as far as.

as I've seen. And I've spoken to like, you know, nearly a thousand on the show in one form or another. And when you see somebody that's got a well-balanced sense of self and they don't castigate themselves if they fall short and they relate to the people around them well and they're connected and their sleep's okay and their health's not bad

and they're not too stressed and all the rest of this stuff, like, holy fuck. Like that's, that's really rare. That's rarer. That's significantly rarer than somebody who is a high performer. And yet we look at the high performance is the ones that are people who have the least desirable internal states have some of the most desirable external lives. And that paradox will never cease to fascinate me. I think it's so fucking interesting. Yeah, I think a really interesting question is, are you actually willing

to make the sacrifices to be at that level? And like people, I don't think take seriously that question. And yeah, of course, like you want to incrementally improve your life and make things better. But do you want to make the sacrifice to be at that level, right, at the very, very top achiever level? And for some people, it's worth it. I think it comes down to values. Like, what do you really value in life, right? You re-examined the Dunning Krueger effect as well. They were just going through and decapitating all of the sort of interesting psychological insights of the last few decades. You know, the Dunning Krueger one is, it's a little hard to explain, but I think it's really fascinating. So just for those that are not as familiar, the basic

done and Krueger effect is the idea that people who have low performance or low skill or low intelligence tend to overestimate their abilities. And the original explanation is that it's because they know so little that they don't even know how to evaluate, right? They're so they're so unskilled, they can't even evaluate skill, so they think they're better than they are, right? So that's the basic idea. Sometimes in modern usage, people also mean the opposite, that people were high skill tend to underestimate their ability. So you could also think of that a Dun & Krueger-like effect, right? So we've got those two things to explain. And if you look at the original research,

the way that they essentially prove the Deming Kruger effect is they'll make these plots of people's actual skill versus their perceived skill. And they'll show that there's a gap where people who are lower in skill are over-shooting their predictions about themselves and people are higher-in-skill or undershooting. They believe they're not as good as they really are.

And they say, look, there's an effect. And so we set about to replicate this, but also we ran a bunch of simulations to try to really understand, like, what produces those plots? And we found two really crazy things. The first crazy thing is that it turns out you can get those plots that look exactly the same as, like, the original learning Kruger studies, with nothing to do with human psychology.

It turns out if you've got a measure skill using something, right, you give people a test or something, right? If you measure skill with something that has a decent amount of noise or error, right? Because, you know, you give people a vocab test, well, you know, there's some noise in it, right? It's not a perfect measure of someone's vocabulary, right? There's some choice of what questions to ask. And so it's somewhat noisy, right?

So you have this imperfect measure. You get it done in Kruger plot. The noise actually causes that effect, where people who you think have lower ability tend to overestimate their ability. And the reason, yeah, it's a little bit subtle, but the reason is because you don't know someone's true ability, right? Like, how would you know?

All you know is someone's measured ability. But measured ability is true ability plus noise. So think about someone who was unlucky on the test. Like they performed worse than their true ability. Oh. So they're going to overestimate. They're going to look like they overestimated with their ability. Right.

But actually they were just unlucky. Oh. Wow, that's so interesting. Holy shit. Yeah, so both groups are maybe accurately perceiving their what should have been, their expected level of output, but due to noise or luck or chance or a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep or a crying baby or whatever, they didn't show up as themselves, and that resulted in a disparity between what should have happened that they predicted and what did happen that they didn't predict. Exactly. And anyone wants to deep dive on this on my YouTube channel, Spencer Greenberg. We've got a video that breaks this down. But yeah, exactly. And so in order to really say, there's a den Krueger effect, you actually have to have a test with incredibly little noise.

It's like a really, really accurate measure to protect against this. And that's really hard to do, right? It's like hard to build such a good test of almost anything. So that's the first problem. It's like, well, we can't, it's hard to even show that it's not just a mathematical artifact. But here's a potentially even bigger problem. Turns out perfectly rational agents also get a done in Krueger effect. Okay, explain that to me.

Yeah. So it seems weird, right? Okay. So suppose you're doing a new skill you've never done before. you've no idea how good you are and you're competing against people who've also never done it before. What would you estimate your percentile to be?

Fuck knows. I guess it would depend on analogous other things that I'd done that were kind of similar to it in the past and I'd try and predict that. Yeah, so if you had analogous exactly, you try to predict it based on that. But let's say you had nothing analogous, right?

You're like, well, what percentile? I have no idea. I have no idea. Well, let's say, would you Would you put yourself with 99th percentile? No, absolutely no. Right. Would you put yourself at first? No, 50th.

Right, right. So you're going to, like, the rational thing, if you don't have information is to be like, okay, I'm probably near the middle, right? Before I get evidence, right? Prior to evidence. Okay. But then think about what happens. If you, the rational thing is put yourself in the middle without evidence. You start getting evidence. What do you do? You update in the information. You use Bayesian reasoning to update. So you get some evidence. As you get more evidence, it pushes you away from the center. So if you get some evidence that you're not very good, you start pushing. a down. If you get evidence, you're good, you start pushing up. Well, guess what that leads to?

It means you end up too close to the center. Everyone is squished towards the center, which is exactly the Dunning Kruger effect. People who are lower skill are overestimated cells because they're squished through the center, and people who are higher skill, they're underestimated themselves because they're squished in the center. Okay, so is the Dunning Krueger effect bullshit? Well, that's the, this is the incredibly unsatisfying thing. I told you how the Dunning Krueger effect might just be a mathematical artifact. It might just be rational actors, but we can't tell the difference. It's so hard to tell.

So I can't even be positive. There's no Denny Krueger effect because I'm just saying, like, these results have two other interpretations, and we can't tell which one it is. Is it irrationality? Is it a mathematical artifact, or is it rational actors being basing reasoners? But I will tell you something funny that we observe. I do think there's some irrationality going on. And that's because you can see in these plots, so we ran our own study and we got these

plots, and we looked at a bunch of others from other studies. What you see is that there tends to be, the line tends to be too high. On average, people overestimate their abilities. And I think that is a pretty robust finding. And so I think this better than average effect, that people tend to overestimate how good. They are on average. I think that is true, and that is a form of a rationality. It's not on Kruger effect, but it is a form of rationality. Of course, it's not true for everyone. Like, depressed people might underestimate their abilities, but on average, right? So that's one thing. The other thing that's really peculiar about these curves is they tend to be really. really flat. In other words, you might think, well, as you get out, get better and better,

you know, you have a slope of one. Like, for every unit of increased skill, you go up by one unit in prediction. It tends to not be what you see. Like, it's really flat where, like, the people are really good, think they're only, like, a little bit better than the people who are not very good. And the extreme flatness, I find very suspicious. It makes it hard for me to believe people are being rational. Because it, like, how could you really have so little evidence about your skill, right? Like, you know, it seems like people actually have a lot of evidence of like how good they are driving or, you know, how intelligence are there or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And yet there's very flat slopes, meaning that the people who are really good

think they're not that much better than everyone else. And actually, the funniest example of this is there's a study asking people to rate how attractive they are on like a, you know, zero to 10 scale. And they also had third parties rate how attractive they are on a zero to 10 scale. It's ridiculously flat. Like almost everyone thinks they're between a six and a seven, like on average. It's like, the lowest attractiveness people on average think they're like a six. And I think they're like a seven. It's like, what is going on here? How is that possible?

But it's super, yeah, it seems like people are weirdly under updating on evidence. With the attractiveness thing, I get the sense, as opposed to something that's more skill-based. I think there is a, there's going to be a huge amount of sort of white coat syndrome or whatever the equivalent is of like, oh, God, like, who says it about themselves that they're an eight out of ten? I'd better say a seven. True, but these are an anonymous survey. So, yeah, I agree. Like, definitely, definitely if you're being interviewed, yeah, but most people would, like, they don't want to seem arrogant.

Social desirability bullshit going on. Yeah, I don't know. Well, I mean, maybe that's just, I get the sense that maybe with things like self-rated attractiveness, it is so enmeshed socially that even if you do, it's anonymous, no one's ever going to see, the metadata has been wiped, we don't know your IP address. it there's just this sort of it feels like someone's watching you over your shoulder

when you think about doing that well you know what's so strange is that people tend to self-assort by attractiveness so they must at some implicit level have a sense of their attractiveness right like I mean like how often when people date are they dating someone who's like pretty close in their trackers like as usual

it's almost always it's almost always even in relationships that are supposedly looks for wealth trades even when you've got the sugar daddy with the playboy model like most of the time when you actually look at those relationships they actually end up starting to match in terms of attractiveness mac and murphy did a great breakdown about this this species podcast he's great and um yeah it was it's fascinating it's really really fascinating that people just seem to so i have a i have a really really spicy

theory about this actually which is um one of the reasons that there's many many many many reasons about why people aren't coupling up. One of the spicier ones that I've got is that with increasing levels of obesity, with calorie-rich foods and hyper-palatable, hyper-process stuff going everywhere, everybody is becoming a little bit bigger. And there has to be a line below which, even if you are also a three, a three just isn't that attractive to you. And I wonder whether there's kind of a lower bracket to attractiveness that people are just not

prepared, they're less prepared, let's say, to get into a relationship with, even if that's your level. But then there's also this sort of lagging indicator of where you know that you should be. Well, that's not who I am underneath. Like, I've gained weight a little bit recently, but they've really gained weight. And it's like, no, dude, you've gained the same amount of weight that she has or whatever. But yeah, I think it's fascinating to see what happens if you, and I guess body weight is probably one of the reliable ways that you could step in and adjust levels of desirability kind of population-wide. It's not to say that you can't have people that are bigger that aren't beautiful,

but you know what I mean in terms of desirability. It's just what are some of the things that have happened across the board. Like, I don't know, if the ozone layer above America got disintegrated and everybody had leathery skin or something like that, like what's something that's happening in a relatively sort of global, or at least like population-wide level, that's impacting appearance. And this is one of the, I guess, interventions, unfortunate. experiments that's kind of being run.

So it's like decreasing baseline how attractive people are to each other. Across the board. That's interesting. You know, Ella, the sex researcher, did a really interesting study where she found she could get people to more accurately indicate their own attractiveness level by having them compare themselves to people of their own gender. So she actually developed a scale of faces that were like people were, you know, faces where people rated them one on average two or three or four.

And then she said, where do you? you rank, like ring yourself against these faces and people were actually more accurate than when they had to put it on like an objective scale themselves. Okay. What do people consistently get wrong about personality disorders? You mentioned earlier on about narcissism and BPDs, stuff like that. Where do we not understand personality disorders very well? Yeah, great question. So this is him I've been deep diving a lot on recently. I actually did a series of interviews from our podcast with a narcissist, a sociopath, some with borderline.

So just search clear thinking on your podcast app if you want to check that out. But I think it is actually like a surprisingly important topic because almost certainly, unless you're like really kind of a hermit, you know people with personality disorders, right? So if we think about even just three personality disorders, we think narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, also like known as sociopathy casually and borderline, like each of them is estimated to be more than 1% of the population. So, you know, you know, a hundred people, you know, there's a good chance, you know, someone with one or more personality disorder. And I think they also, well, they're absolutely people with personality disorders are good people and not harmful.

They tend to have an elevated risk of causing harm to others. There's like a very substantially elevated risk, especially if you end up in a romantic relationship or a business relationship or they're your best friend or that kind of thing or family member. So I think it is useful and important to understand these disorders. I think the first, like, big misconception is that people confuse, like, traits with the disorders. You know, people think, you know, a lot of people would be like, oh, my ex-partner was a narcissist or my boss is a narcissist or whatever. And I think it's important to understand that, like, these are, these are trait-based things, right? That narcissism is a trait. Grandiosity is a trait.

You know, manipulatness is a trait. And so everyone kind of is somewhere on the spectrum of these traits. And most people who are, like, somewhat narcissistic or somewhat, you know, manipulative or not, they don't have the disorder. I think that's, so I think on the first, on the one hand, they're, like, often overdiagnosed. Like, people are, like, accusing others of having them and they usually don't. On the other hand, the people that do have them often go overlooked, and, like, people actually don't realize that they have them, and that sometimes comes at an incredible cost. So they're both being overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed at the same time.

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, I think one thing that contributes a little bit here, if you think about, let's say some of a narcissistic personality disorder, if you really get to the core of like their underlying motivations, which is how I like to think about it, I think what they're really driving towards fundamentally is attention and admiration as sort of like their highest value or drive and thinking of themselves as special and better than other people. And if you think about it that way, you realize that their behaviors are not necessarily what people would expect of a narcissist. And so let me give an example. Suppose that someone says, hey, Chris,

that's a really cool watch. Like, I really like it. Where'd you get it, right? You might think of that as sort of like a nice thing to say, right? An altruistic kind of thing to say. But what do you think is likely to happen after someone gives you, let's suppose you, like, actually care about your watch, right? Like, what do you think is likely to happen after that?

You care about your watch more. You tell them maybe they go and buy it as well. Yeah, so that's on your side. But also, like, you probably feel kind of good about that person, right? That's like a nice thing. Oh, of course. Yeah, pro-social. What a lovely compliment.

thanks Spencer yeah I love this watch I'm glad that you notice and how do you think that affects the likelihood that you compliment them later uh yes yes yes yes so it's this sort of reciprocal debt that you need to pay exactly because they love admiration and attention and feeling special so they flattering even though that doesn't seem like the sort of thing that somebody who is a narcissist would do flattery as a tool that they can use to reciprocally get that back yes and I think it's useful to think of like obviously people have different skill levels but it's useful to think of a lot of people with narcissistic personality disorder as experts in getting admiration and attention. So they're not using, like some of them use really like crude methods.

They're just brag, you know, really boldly and, you know, and obnoxiously. But they're experts in getting admiration and attention. So they do sly, subtle things. They give you really nice compliments. It make you feel special and make you like them and make you give them a compliment later, right? I'll give you another example. My friend was dating a narcissist and we were talking about him. And she's like, you know, it's, I mean, he's just tech book like everything you know it's clearly a narcissist but she was saying you know the thing is that like i felt like he wasn't a narcissist because he would give away all this money anonymously to charity and i was like that's really interesting how did you know about that so he would literally

constantly brag about his anonymous donations so it's no longer anonymous yeah but it worked like it somehow worked right where she was like persuaded by this that he must not be narcissistic. And so I think that like if you think about them being savvy at this, it really changes your perspective. And it makes you realize that they're a lot harder to pick up on than a lot of people realize. And that's why people often misidentified, right? And in fact, there was a fascinating study where they measured people's narcissum and had them give like a just a two-minute speech about themselves, like introduce yourself to the whole room. And they asked people to rate how likable people were. And what do you think happened? The narcissists were more likable.

than I just were more likable. In fact, not only were they more likable, they were even more likable, if they cut out the audio, so people, like they had people watch videos and they cut out the audio, they were still more likable. Their facial expressions were more likable.

Their clothing was more likable. Like they're like experts in being likable. They've curated themselves. Exactly. But they, people's impression of them does tend to fall over time. Right? Because, you know, it's a bit of a mask, right?

It's like they're trying to get you. Eventually. Yeah, yeah. And so I think, I think, um, I think it's really important to know when you're dealing with someone who's narcissic personality disorder. It doesn't mean you should necessarily cut them out of your life. It doesn't mean they're a bad person necessarily. But I think you should know. It is an extremely elevated risk to causing harm. And then you should take that seriously and say, do I want this person

in my life? And if you do want them in your life, it also is helpful to know because they actually can help you relate to them much more effectively if you understand the way that their minds operate. What about sociopathy and BPD? Yeah. So sociopathy. So I used to never be able to identify sociopaths until about three years ago. And something suddenly clicked. And I, I meet them like all the time. It's absolutely wild. Like, I almost can't believe how often I meet them. I was at a party like three months ago. I met two sociopaths at the party. Now, you might say, Spencer, maybe you're full of shit. How do you know there's social place? I'll tell you, do you don't want to know how I know their sociopaths? Yes, yes, yes.

I take them aside and I say, hey, I know this is a weird question, but have you ever considered the possibility that you have any social personality disorder? And do you know what they say to me? They only say something very similar. No, what are they saying? They say, no emotional reaction. They say, I have considered that. Yeah, but then we have a conference.

Presumably, you're not saying that to everybody. No, I'm just saying to the people I think it's just about that. So what's the lead indicator? What's the indicator that happened before? Yeah, so here's the funny thing. You might think it's like, oh, I must be noticing that they're, you know, acting manipulative or callously. right or whatever. It's very rarely that actually. It's, I think the best way I think of sociopaths is it's

like, imagine there were aliens that look just like humans, right? Obviously, they're not aliens, but their minds operate so differently that it's like their aliens. So how would you tell someone as an alien, right? You would notice that they said something that like, when no human would say, it's just like out of the distribution of human behavior. That's actually what I noticed. And I don't think they're sociopath immediate. It's not like, I'm like, oh, they did something so unusual that they're sociopath. What I'm, I like, my obsession is. human psychology. So when I noticed someone do something like where I'm like, I would predict like essentially zero people would ever do that thing and this person just did that

thing, I like become really curious. I start asking questions. And then that's when I developed the theory. Then I ask him about it. So let me give you an example. Talk to a guy at a conference. We were talking about how sometimes you can feel emotions in your body. And I was like, oh, do you ever feel emotions in your body? He's like, yes. One time I was driving down the highway and a refrigerator fell out of the back of the truck, smashed through my windshield. And I felt something in my stomach. And I was like, uh, what? So I didn't think this is a social battle. I was just like, what is going on? This is not a psychology I'm familiar with. And then, you know, we talked about it for a while. And then, you know, then he eventually came out that

he keeps a list of everyone who's wronged him. And once a month, he checks it to see him if he can hurt any of those people in ways that it take very little effort because he wouldn't want to spend a lot of effort to hurt them. But if there's a low effort way he could hurt them, then And he might as well because they hurt him. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I mean,

that's a slightly bright, a red flag. Well, yeah, exactly. But he probably wouldn't say that in just the normal conversation, right? So it's usually,

usually what happens is there's this thread of, wow, this person like seems like an alien. Like they don't seem like a human, like there's something they said is so unusual. And then that's the thread that I pull on and then eventually, yeah. I actually like hanging out of Sosipas way more than narcissists.

Why? They just tend to be. Well, no, the thing, I think the fundamental thing is that narcissists, they tend to make everything about their ego and as much as they can. So everything's being redirected back their ego. And I just find that like very uninteresting. It's actually very boring as well. As opposed to someone who's a sociopath who you're not going to trust,

but is kind of fascinating at a distance. Exactly. Yeah. And the sociopath, you know, they're like when I, for example, when I interviewed the sociopath, she describes it almost like, she doesn't even know who her fundamental self. is like she is like a shell and she's like learn to blend in so you like think that she's just like you but it's like this practice thing over years like I've asked sociopaths like do you

like watching movies because like I don't know without empathy like if you don't like have empathy for the characters like do you what are you interested in exactly and they tell me they love movies because they teach them how to behave like one sociopath is saying that he learned that if your friend's dad dies you have to you have to make a sad face and then say I'm so sorry It's like someone's read a handbook on how to be a human. Yeah, and I think this is where we can differentiate being low-functioning, high-functioning sociopaths, that low-functioning ones often have struggle to fit in. Like, they don't learn those skills.

They don't get adept. And so they constantly have this jarring thing where they're ostracized and people don't like them or whatever. And then the high-functioning ones, like the ones you meet in a boardroom, the ones you meet, you know, in a courtroom or the one, you know, as the lawyer, or not the convicted felon, they tend to be really good at blending in, right? They've worked their whole life at blending in. What's the difference between sociopath and psychopath?

Yeah, that's a good question. So unfortunately, the terms are like all messy and all over the place. Technically, psychopath is like not in the DSM-5, which is the diagnostic and cystical manual, nor a sociopath. The technical term is antisocial personality disorder. And it tends to focus more in like the outward signs, like manipulativeness and violating the rights.

of others, whereas I tend to focus more on, like, with the internal experiences, because I think it gives a deeper sense of, like, who they are. Sometimes sociopath is used to refer to less severe forms of the disorder, where psychopaths is the more severe forms. Sometimes sociopaths are thought to be more, like, hot-headed and emotional, where psychopaths is more cold-blooded. And then there's also something called the Psychopath Checklist, which is sometimes used as a scale to measure, like, really severe levels that's used in prisons and stuff like that. But unfortunately, the terms are really not standardized. And the sociopaths I've talked to tend to sort of use them interchangeably.

Right. Okay. Can you think of how narcissism or sociopathy is adaptive? Is this a spandrel? Is this a weird byproduct of stuff? Or is this an adaptive trait that we needed at some point? It's a great question. It's obviously hard to know for sure. I'll tell you my speculation.

Narcists tend to be good at getting admiration and attention and I think that that actually sets people up to be leaders and to get everyone to rally around them. And so I think that they're way overrepresented among politicians. I think they're way overrepresented among, like people who are in the public spotlight, leaders of all different sorts. And I think it cuts both ways.

On the one hand, they tend to be drawn to those kind of positions because that's what they want. They also, though, I think, tend to be better. because they're like practiced their whole life they're getting admiration and attention, right? They also are overrepresented among cult leaders. And so I think we have like the negative archetype of the narcissist as a cult leader.

Like it's everything is about themselves and they want to be worship like a God. The positive archetype of a narcissist would be like a visionary CEO who's maybe willing to like, doesn't care so much about, you know, the well-being of their employees because they have this bigger vision,

this grandiose vision. But they might end up playing a very positive role in society because they, Right. Yeah. Their self-belief and their desire to achieve things in the world will have some negative externalities. But if either by design or by fluke, they were pointing in a direction which is a net benefit for humanity overall, you end up with them being like kind of antisocial or manipulative on route. And you end up with a question there of whether or not the ends justify the means to get there. Yeah. And you can think of it as someone who's like, they're devoted to that grandiose vision. rather than, you know, the people around them or, right, things like that. And sometimes that great idea's vision ushers in something really important, right? I think they really can rally people and get people moving the same direction,

which is also why they make great co-leaders and harb of a lot of people, right? What about sociopathy? Yeah, so let me ask you a question. Imagine you're living in a tribe of 100 people, you know, 50,000 years ago. When would you want a sociopathic of a tribe and when would you not? maybe when there is some sort of fracturing internally some sort of mutiny, treacherous kind of gamesmanship type thing and you need somebody that can shape-shift and do the kind of political gamesman thing

back and forth. Psychopath, again, the definition is kind of messy. Perhaps when there was a war, I guess, as well, you need to be conniving and manipulative with, basically any time that there's a rivalrous game going on, either internally or externally, and you need someone that can play that and not have any empathy or hesitation around fucking other people over. I think that's astute, right? Like, imagine, for example, there's, you're surrounded by a bunch of tribes. They hate you. They want to kill you. they might just come and, like, kill you all or, you know, rape the women or whatever.

Like, but there's a sociopath in your team who doesn't want them to come kill you. And you're like, yeah, that sociopath might just go and assassinate their leader and not think twice about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like just, well, I'll just go over and just go over and kill them. You know, and it's like, well, actually, that's pretty useful to have on your team.

But imagine you're in peacetime, right? Like, everyone's planting the fields and things are good. Like, do you want that sociopath? You know, it's a little bit like having a wolf with a bunch a sheep, right? Like, the sociopath is going to, it's like probably not doing their The sociopath is, is being wartime manipulative during peace, and that's not really what you need. Well, I mean, I guess who's to say that the sociopath would actually, they're kind of like, you know what sociopath's kind of like? They're kind of like a misaligned

AI. They're kind of like a relatively powerful agent that you just don't know what direction and they're pointing it. Because who's to say that during a time of what, we've seen in movies and stuff a lot, but there is a distraction that creates a vacuum of leadership internally, and someone, as opposed to trying to help the tribe by using their sociopathy against the opposition, they use it internally to try and capture power for themselves because this is a turbulent moment where they can step in and ascend to the top. Yeah, I'll tell you something. A top VC in Silicon Valley, I told me this. I don't know why he told me this. He told me he likes to fund small startups

and associates as leaders, but then he kicks them out when the company becomes big. And he said it's because when there's a small company, the sociopaths, like, interests are very aligned with like the startup succeeding. And they're willing to make like really brutal cut-throat decisions. But when it gets big, they actually benefit most by just extracting value from the company itself. Whereas the small startup doesn't have value to extract. And so it's like crazy. Like, I essentially find sociopaths and it kicks them out of our compass. Dude, I mean, if you want to use sociopaths as the launch pad booster rocket to get your heavy load out of orbit and then you actually switch to a cleaner fuel source

once you get up into the atmosphere, I guess. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I had this idea, I guess. I wonder whether we're over-pathologizing difficult people as disordered. rather than just unpleasant. It's like how many people are just fucking unpleasant to be around? That's absolutely true. I mean, the vast majority of people are like kind of a dick or unpleasant.

They don't have a, they don't have a personality disorder, right? They're just, you know, a bit of a narcissist or they're a bit of a dick or they're, or they're just like dealing with their own shit and they're like, they put it out on you because they don't have good emotional regulation skills, right? So it is a lot of that. And like, we're really talking here about extreme personality types, like really, really extreme where you you know something I thought a lot about like is it even useful having these categories right if these are all traits that are on a spectrum my suspicion is that what happens is as

you get more and more extreme it starts to dominate more and more of their behavior so you know if someone's a little narcissistic they may not have that much in common with other a little bit narcissistic people right because they have so many other things going on but if like narcissism actually drives like is their fundamental drive in life they actually might be really similar to other narcissistic because like guided by the same North Star. So I think that's what happens. That's why I think these categories are useful. At the real extreme, you start noticing so many similarities across them.

Because this, it's, if someone is 99% made of custard, it's okay to say that you are custard. But if you're only sort of 65% made of custard, it's like, well, I'm kind of interested in what the other 35% of that is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, custard analogies. You weren't thinking I was going to go there today. dude your work's so fucking good

you're like the only guy I know that's doing this stuff and it's just as well that you've got the obsession because I don't think that anybody else would be prepared to put up with the level of like fiddliness that you have to do in order to be able to test this stuff so everyone needs to check out all of the shit

that you've got going on where the links will be posted around but where do you want them to go to? Oh thank you so much yeah so if a new YouTube channel would love for you to check it out subscribe. If you find it interesting, just search Spencer Greenberg on YouTube, my podcast, Clearthing with Spencer Greenberg, search you to any podcast app. And our website, clearthing.org, we have so much, so much stuff. We have over 80 tools you can use on there for all kinds of things, forming healthy habits. We've got a tool, an actual cognitive assessment tool. So if you want to assess

your cognitive ability, strengths, and weaknesses. So lots of stuff on there. Dude, you're a king. Until next time, get some more studies done. And let's run this back soon. Thanks so much, Chris. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction and there's real life stories and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to do.

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