The 5 Most Effective Techniques To Hack Your Habits - Spencer Greenburg

How useful are personality tests in your opinion? Ah, that is a great question. So, we've just run a really big study on this that I'm super excited about. In fact, this is the first time I'm ever talking about it. So, hot off the presses. So, the most popular personality test in the world seems to be the Myers-Briggs test. But, the Myers-Briggs test, also called the MBTI, is a commercial test, right? So, it's hard to study because it's, you know, it's owned by a company and so on. So, what we did is we took the public information about the constructs that have been, you know, known about what it's trying to measure. And we've designed our own test designed to measure those same constructs. I'll just call it a Youngian test because it's, you know, it's not exactly precisely the same as the commercial one, but it's designed to measure similar ideas. And then, we actually put it to the test. And so, the way the way that we did this is we also developed what's called a Big Five test. Are you familiar with the Big Five personality model? Yes. So, these are So, it's interesting because the Big Five personality model is the one used by academics. It's the one they call the gold standard. Whereas, the Myers-Briggs is the one that's like super popular for the lay people, and often, you know, academics kind of poopoo it and say, "Ah, it's not so great, right?" And so, so we wanted to put them against each other. And so, the way we did this is we took a whole bunch of facts about a person's life. It was about 42 different facts. So, everything from how satisfied they are with their life to how many friends they have, you know, to things like, you know, have they been arrested and so on. And then, we had them take both of these tests, our Big Five test, gold standard academic one, and and this Youngian test designed after the Myers-Briggs, and said, "Well, how well can each test predict what's true about people's lives as a measure of how good they are?" So, do you want to guess what happened when we did this? And I'll just before I have you guys, I'll just throw in one third thing. We also used astrological sun signs as a control group. So, we took people, you know, zodiac sign, are you a Pisces or an Aries or whatever, and that was our our kind of control. So, we tried to predict things about your life using that, uh this Youngian idea, and then using the Big Five. Why did you need the astrology thing? Oh, it's a good way to calibrate uh the statistics of our system to see if we have Yeah, if uh if it whether we can predict with astrology, right? Right. Okay. Uh I would guess that Myers-Briggs performed probably quite poorly. I'd guess that the Big Five was more accurate. Probably moderately accurate. I'd guess maybe it captures like let's say maybe between 30 and 50% of the outcomes that someone gets. And then Myers-Briggs is is less, but I don't know how much less. Okay, that's that's a great guess. So, I'll start with our control group, the zodiac signs, astrology. So, it had 0% predictive accuracy across all 42 outcomes. So, literally it won't predict nothing about people. Now, Okay, I That's sort of what I expected, but I wanted to be fair and really give it a shot. So, we ran exactly the same procedure. Okay. Um then we look at the Young and test, and that predicted So, the way we measure this, it's a measure called R. It was about 0.14. So, basically you can think about that as it's a bit correlated with these outcomes. So, 0.14 correlation to the outcomes when you when you use that. Um Sorry, so it's slightly worse than that. So, it's 0.11. So, it's about 0.11. So, a little bit correlated outcomes. The Big Five was twice as good. So, it's 0.22. And this leads to a really funny thing, which is that Myers-Briggs ideas in our test was exactly halfway between astrology and the Big Five. So, that's kind of a fun takeaway. Why do you think it's the case that Myers-Briggs is so much less accurate than the Big Five? Well, we studied this uh quite extensively. So, the first thought we had is maybe it's because the Myers-Briggs has four factors that it's measuring, right? So there's the E versus the I, the N versus the S, and so on. Whereas the Big Five has five factors, so maybe that's giving the Big Five an advantage. Now, to be fair, we designed both tests have the same number of questions, so it wasn't the number of questions that was making the difference. So then we could say, "Well, what if we get rid of the fifth factor of the Big Five?" The fifth factor being neuroticism, which is the which is the Big Five factor in personality that's least related to Myers-Briggs. And when we did that, it did hurt the accuracy of the Big Five. It fell from about a .22 correlation to about .14, but it still beat the Myers-Briggs, which is pretty wild. So So that wasn't the full explanation. Even the four the four factors of the Myers-Briggs just seemed to just not be doing as good a job as those four other factors of the Big Five. There's also another thing that really hurts the Myers-Briggs. So I said that had about a .11 correlation predicting these 42 outcomes, right? Well, that's actually being a little generous to the Myers-Briggs kind of test because very often when they're presented, they're done as dichotomies, right? They don't give you a score on every trait. They say, "You're an I or an E. You're an N versus S." This is typically how people use the test. You would say, "I'm an ENTJ," right? That actually hurts the accuracy even more. And the reason is because most personality traits fall a bell curve, right? If you you know, you imagine the shape of a bell, there are lots and lots of people near the middle of a trait, and there are fewer as you get further away from the center. The problem is if you dichotomize these traits, you're essentially cutting them down the middle. Imagine cutting a bell down the middle, and anyone who just happens to be the left side, you you call an I, and anyone who happens to be on the right side, you call an E. But that You're lumping you're lumping an awful lot of people, some that are moderate, some that are quite extreme, and some that are very extreme all in together. Precisely. Precisely. And there's a whole bunch of people right near the margin. So if they maybe if they you know, if they had their coffee 10 minutes earlier today, they might have answered one question differently and flipped from an I to an E. So they for that reason these kinds of tests tend to be unstable. And so that actually when you take it that into account, it actually hurt the accuracy even more. It falls from 0.11 correlation to 0.08. Wow. So a lot of people My people all of the people who've got their Myers-Briggs personality type in their bios on Instagram and Twitter are halfway between a legitimate personality test and just saying Pisces. I would say in a way, but I do want to I do want to steel man the the point of view that says that that the Myers-Briggs Southhouse are actually a good test. And the the thing that I think is actually really useful about them is that they help provide a language that a lot of people use to communicate things about themselves and communicate things about each other, right? Um so I'm an ENTJ according to Myers-Briggs. And if you tell someone that, it could communicate a lot of information very quickly. And so it provides a kind of shorthand language. It's also not totally useless. Like it's not It doesn't have zero predictive accuracy, right? It has some. So I you know, I don't want to discredit. I think it does actually help people understand themselves and each other. I just think we could do even better if we used more more accurate tests. Um so you know, if you think in terms of the Big Five, which has five factors, it's got this one has the acronym OCEAN is used. So you've got O for openness, which is like openness to experiments, openness to ideas, being imaginative, things like that. You've got C conscientiousness, which is being like organized and disciplined, things like that. Um you've got the E for extraversion, which is actually very similar to the Myers-Briggs extraversion. Uh you got A for agreeableness, which is being compassionate and polite. And then N for neuroticism, which is experiencing intense emotions, anxiety, depression, things like that. Would you ever consider doing HEXACO? That's a great question. So some people have argued in favor of the HEXACO model, which basically adds a sixth factor to the Big Five. And the the basic argument goes that if So actually let me just step back and say, how was the Big Five invented at all? Like why are we What Where did the Big Five come from? So the basic idea is they took all the different ways you could describe someone in English language. So all these different adjectives. And they they said to people, "For each of these adjectives, say which apply to yourself and say which don't." And then once they collected all this data, they did a statistical analysis. And what they were looking for is certain adjectives, if you say it applies to you, there other adjectives it also probably implies will apply to you, too. So, if you say that you're organized, you're also probably will say that you're, you know, rule-abiding or something like that, right? If you say that you're social, you're also probably say that you're talkative. And so, what they found just purely statistically, this is is not theory-driven, it was actually empirically driven, they found these five clusters of traits, right? That's where the OCEAN model comes from, O-C-E-A-N. Each is a cluster of traits that that cluster together. And then people also replicated this work by instead of having people describe themselves, they had people describe each other. And so, they they seem to get similar results. Now, some psychologists have argued that you need to add a sixth factor, um that you if you do the factor analysis in some settings, you get the sixth one, and they call it the H factor, and it stands for honesty-humility. And so, it's things like, you know, are you do you lie? Do you manipulate people? Do you brag? Are you arrogant? Things like that. It's sort of like the evilness factor to some extent. Um this is a debate that's raged back and forth in the psychological community about like to what extent is it really there, why is it not always found reliable. I mean, we did one test, this was a very preliminary test where we just try to see if we could get better predictive accuracy using HEXACO than the Big Five, and we didn't see much advantage. So, we generally just don't use it in our models because we just didn't see enough enough reason to add it, you know, if you're going to add in a sixth factor, you want it to really be driving outcomes. Yeah, I like HEXACO. I learned about honesty-humility on an episode, maybe 6 months ago, about bullying, actually. Really awesome episode about bullying. And um it was the first time that anybody had ever folded in the honesty-humility element of it. Uh and it really does make sense. It it certainly feels like a uh a dynamic like an area of territory that um isn't fully covered that would also be important. But then, I mean, you know, I can just somebody else that has a different value set to me might say that oh well, I think that this your opinion on ice cream is really important or something else, right? Like it's just me feeling out some idea about what I think matters. Uh but yeah, the the other explanation that I've heard for or the justification for HEXACO is that it lines with evolutionary explanations more accurately. That it is able to be you can use adaptive explanations for behavior more effectively when you're using HEXACO than when you're using the Big Five. Um but yeah, I I think that you're really right. The Myers-Briggs, I'm an INTJ. I don't even remember what any of those stand for or what that really means. But by making discrete buckets of this, um it does cause people who are only am I a moderate INTJ? Am I an extreme I am Am I a capital I lowercase N? Like what's the proportion of this? But as you said, it allows you very very quickly to communicate an awful lot of information about your personality. And even if it's only, you know, a little bit correlated, that's more than saying, "Okay, so what percentile politeness are you? And what percentile agreeableness am I? And what percentile da da da da are you?" Cuz that's like how am I supposed to put all of this together? So, I suppose yeah, this this trade-off accuracy for brevity uh is a trade-off really that you're making between Big Five and Myers-Briggs. Exactly. And so, we actually also looked at why people like the Myers-Briggs. So, we included this in one of the studies we ran. And we found this fascinating thing. We showed people their Youngian report at the end of taking our study, and we also showed them their Big Five report. And they felt that they were about equally accurate. So, that that was fascinating to us, because we know that we actually have more predictive power with the Big Five results. But people then perceive it as uh more accurate. We also found a real a really fascinating thing, which is that we asked people how good did it make you feel? And people found that the the Youngian report made them feel better than the big five report. And this makes sense if you start thinking about what the big five says. It says, "Hey buddy, you're disagreeable and neurotic and closed, right?" And it's like, "Oh yeah, that's kind of makes you sound like shit." And then whereas if you look at, you know, Myers-Briggs test, what are they telling you? They're They're not telling you you're you're bad. They're never telling you you're bad. They're saying, "You're either thinking or feeling." Those both sound like great things, right? Um but if you think about the thinking-feeling tradeoff, well, in big five, the closest thing is actually agreeableness, and it's telling you you're agreeable or disagreeable, right? Neither of those things sound good. Yeah, neither of them sound good. And if you think about the the sort of my the kind of Myer-Briggs approach with thinking-feeling, what it's saying is that, "Oh no, it's not that you're either like a compassionate person feeling or you're a jerk, right?" It's that you're either a compassionate person or you're logic-based, right? That sounds way better, right? You're not a jerk, you're just using logic. branding from Myer-Briggs for all of the different types, yeah. And it gives you a nice language that the big five has struggled to give you that language that really concisely can say, "I'm a blank blank blank." And people are like, "Oh yeah, I got it." You also did some big studies on habit setting recently. Obviously, something that a lot of people are very obsessive over. Atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the best-selling non-fiction books maybe ever, but certainly of the last five years, probably the best-selling non-fiction book over the last five years except for maybe some autobiographies. What did you learn from this big study? Yeah, so this was really exciting. We actually ran two really big studies. The first was a was actually kind of a bonkers study. We said, "We don't know what actually really works in the real world to help people form habits. So we're going to test 22 things simultaneously." And so the design of the study is we recruited a large number of people, it was like something like 500 people, and we randomized them. So each person got five habit techniques picked from a set of 22 that we implemented. And then that what that meant is at the end of the study, we could then analyze the relationship between which of these 22 techniques someone was randomized to get and how they formed their habit. Did they succeed at ultimately? And there were some really interesting findings. So this was our first study and then later we went to confirm it. But the first study, some interesting findings. First of all, many of these techniques did not work at all, which was really fascinating to see. In fact, the vast majority of them completely bombed, right? So that's that's the first takeaway. Human behavior change is hard. It's fundamentally difficult. Lots of people want to go tell you that they have the the one, you know, quick life hack to change your behavior. Uh no, not really. Sorry. Unfortunately, that doesn't work that way. Um the second thing that we found that was really interesting is that motivation was matter a great deal. There there was there was one of the strongest predictive factors of whether someone succeeded their habit was just how motivated they were at the beginning. And this is kind of an obvious thing, but it actually really speaks to this idea that if you're going to try to form a new habit, try to pick one you feel really motivated to do. Like don't pick the one that you just like are force-feeding yourself. Pick the one that you're really excited about um because you actually probably will have a better chance of success. So obvious, but but useful insight. Um Okay. So then what actually worked in this pilot study, right? Um we found five things that actually seemed to be promising. Um I'll tell you about I'll just tell you about a couple of them just so you know, so I don't give you a long list. But the first that I thought was really interesting is this technique we call habit reflection. Um and the way that that works is you look back at a previous habit you've succeeded at. And you write down, and it's important to write this down, what did you do that helped you succeed with that previous habit? You know, did you try to do it at the same time every day? Did you tell your friends that you wanted to do this habit? Or whatever. Whatever it is that you did that you think helped you succeed. Then you do the second step, which is you write down how you can apply those lessons to this new habit. And so what's really cool about this habit reflection technique, it only takes a few minutes, but it's sort of self-customizing. It's really a an introspection exercise to figure out what works for you based on your own past results. So in a way it's sort of dumb and obvious, but it's like who would have ever thought to do this until it popped out and I was like, uh it's like the machine extrapolated volition for the for the alignment problem in like AGI that you're using you to split test all of the different ideas and then once you've come up with a winner, you refer back to you to sort the current problem. Absolutely. And it you know, it reminds me also of like some of the work of Daniel Kahneman and how you um how do you get around things like the planning fallacy where you know, people will say, "Oh, yeah, I'll get this project done in 2 months." and then it'll take 6 months, right? And he's like, "Okay, go think back to past cases. Like how long did it actually take you in real situations that you were in that were similar?" It's like, "Go back to your past habit. Analyze it. What actually worked? What didn't work?" right? So, simple but but uh potentially very useful. Um another one I want to mention and this one takes a little bit of a preamble. So, one of the ideas I think is really powerful in habit formation is this idea of triggers. Um and so, on my podcast, uh it's called the Clearer Thinking Podcast, I had an expert about habits and he had this really nice acronym when you think about habits, you can think about the different triggers for those habits. Um so, his name is Jim Davies and he calls it the habit acronym, h a b i t, very convenient. So, the first is that your your habits can be triggered by the humans around you, that's the h. They can be triggered by the activity you're doing, that's the a. They can be triggered by your bearing, which is where you are. Like are you at your home or your office? Uh then there's the i, that you can be triggered by your internal state, like how if you're hungry or not, for example. And finally, t, the time of day, right? And so, for our study, we were thinking about, well, is there some way to bring triggers into your habit that's super simple, dead easy, anyone can do it? And so, we came up with this is ridiculously stupid method. We call home reminders. You just write notes to yourself and you place them around your home of like, "When this happens, do this." or here's the habit I'm going to do every day. And yeah, that was another one out of the 22, that was one of the best performing. Strange as stupid as it is. So, I I love incredibly stupid simple things that actually seem to work. So, I had laser eye surgery about 3 weeks ago now, and there is a protocol of eye drops that you need to keep doing to keep the eye health good and whatever. And these eye drops come in little droppers, maybe sort of 2 mil, 3 mil droppers. And it's such a good idea because I've got them everywhere. They are all over my house, which means I'm sat at my desk, it's like, "Ah, it's probably been about 2 hours since I put eye drops in." I'm going to go to the bathroom. Like, I'll I'll take one of the the droppers with me and I'll I'll make sure that I do that. Or they're next to my bathroom upstairs in my bedroom, or they're you know, wherever. Like, they're in my gym bag, they're everywhere. And that's kind of like a a physical version of the post-it note, I suppose. What are the other three? Run us Run us through all five. People want to know the the big winners. Yeah, yeah, sure. Um okay, so we've got habit reflection, habit reminders are the ones we talked about. The next one is mini habits, and this will be familiar to people that have read um James Clear's book. Uh the idea is you take the habit that you want to form. Let's say you want to like you're like, "Okay, I want to do my like full workout routine every morning." You design a tiny version of this that is so fast and simple that you never have an excuse not to do it. And then basically you set a rule that if you do not have time or effort, motivation, whatever, to do the full version, you at least have to do the mini version, right? Um so So, your mini version might be, "Okay, do 10 push-ups." You never have an excuse not to do 10 push-ups, you know, if you can Well, assuming you can do 10 push-ups. Um but uh but you may have a you know, maybe you have a legitimate excuse not to go to the gym for 40 minutes, right? Right. And then, what's the reason what why why is that so effective at keeping the habit going? The what what why don't people just tumble into only doing 10 push-ups and never going to the gym? Yeah, it's a good question cuz you could worry, "Okay, maybe I'm just going to every day do 10 push-ups instead." Um but I think my my theory is that the bigger problem is not that you start the habit and you don't you know you don't do the full thing. It's that you actually just don't do the habit, right? So it's like it's just establishing the habit is more important than doing the full habit because it's a bigger failure mode. So the key is never miss a day even if it means you just did 10 push-ups because at least the 10 push-ups then there's an opportunity to remind yourself oh my goal is actually go to the gym, right? Whereas the bigger problem is 4 weeks from now you're just like not even thinking about going to the gym at all. Uh how much of this do you think is the story that we tell ourselves about momentum and consistency and like shame and guilt and and self-doubt around whether or not we can achieve things? Yeah, it's it's a good question. Um I think there's this powerful idea that success is motivating for further success. And so let's say that every day you only do 10 push-ups when you meant to go do you know 40 minutes of the gym, you might actually feel bad about that. You might actually feel like you failed. And um but that's just a framing thing, right? It's just like well that you decided that's a failure. Uh what I would actually encourage is the opposite. You say until you've established yes if every single day you're doing 10 push-ups, now it's time to set the by heart ba- bar you know higher and say okay, can I go to the gym for 40 minutes? But until you are doing 10 push-ups every single day without fail Mhm. if you do it you should feel good about that. You're like yes, I am I I was saying that the reason I think this does work is that if you don't have even anything that is the microcosm version of the proper habit then you are generally a piece of right? Like I didn't go to the gym at all, I didn't even do one push-up, I just laid in bed. Uh I think that it helps to avoid the downward spiral of that pattern recognition. Oh, I'm the sort of person that doesn't go to the gym. I'm exactly the sort of person that wouldn't do the this thing. And before you know it James talks so much about like identity-based habit change which I guess maybe one of the remaining two, or maybe not. Um but this works with identity-based habit change. Like, if you are the sort of person who goes to the gym for 40 minutes on average two or three times a week, and on the days that you don't, you're the sort of person that makes sure that they do 10 push-ups at home, I think you can probably say that, "Yeah, I'm like a physically disciplined person." You know, I do when I say I'm going to do a thing, I do a thing. And kind of like the Myers-Briggs being quite binary, this also reduces down the binary nature. It also almost gives you uh a spectrum of of habits to go on, right? You're not just I either did the habit going to the gym, which was a one, or zero, I didn't go. There's like, "Oh, there's like a There's like a 50th percentile here, which is I did 10 push-ups." Absolutely. Yeah, it gives you a finer grain reward system. You don't have to It doesn't have to be complete success or complete failure, right? Um and I think I think this kind of ideas is especially important for people that are really struggling. Like, if you're struggling with really severe depression or really severe anxiety, maybe just a little thing is all you can manage right now, and that could be a huge success for you. So, you don't need to set your goal really high and then feel like you're failing. Like, set your goal at something achievable. You should be able to do it with high rate of success, and then go do it, and now you're like, "Okay, well, maybe I'm not working out 48 minutes a day, but I'm doing 10 push-ups a day, and that's something to feel good about." And then they're like, now you can bootstrap on top of that. All right. Number four. Okay. Number four, again, we love super simple, stupid things, but the key is do they work? That's the So, the the next one is um we used to call it supportive a friend. And so, here the idea is think of someone in your life who would actually be helpful at supporting your habit. And go tell them about it, and ideally suggest a way that they can support your habit. So, this is going to vary from person to person. You know, sometimes it might be a partner who can help motivate you, or maybe they have a habit, and they can remind you to do it with them every day. Uh maybe it'll be a friend who can check in periodically. Maybe yeah, you maybe it'll be a buddy you're going to go to gym with, right? So, there's a lot of different ways this can operate, but basically involving another person who's going to play support for you. And of course, it's up to you who is supportive and who's going to demotivate you, right? Um And then that brings us to the final one, which is again super simple, which is we call it listing habit benefits. You simply we this is right at the beginning when you're forming your habit, you just make a list of all the reasons that this is a thing you want to do and all the benefits it's going to give you. And it's just trying to give you you know, going back to motivation and how key that was to people succeeding and how predictive it was. You're trying to do is bootstrap that motivation. Once you've decided that this is the thing I'm going to try to do, you want to get your motivation level as high as you can. And you can also review that benefit list from time to time to help like to you know, respond that motivation if it's flagging. Out of the original 22 techniques, which were the ones that worked the absolute worst? Were there any that had a negative impact on habit setting or were there any that were just like this is completely pointless? Oh, that's a that's a great question. Um well, I'll tell you the most shocking one that didn't work. Which is in the academic literature, there's this technique called WOOP. Um it's like wish uh outcome obstacle plan, I think it stands for. And the idea it's it's this idea that it has been long established in academic literature that basically what you do is you think about this goal that you're going to um try to achieve. And then you think about the outcomes if you do successfully achieve it, but then you think about the obstacles in the way to achieving it. And then finally you come up with a plan like when this obstacle comes up, I'm going to do this. Um when that obstacle comes up, I'm going to do that. It's very it makes sense intuitively that it would work. We thought it was going to work. Um we even powered our study specifically to test it because we just thought, okay, this is a nice like standard intervention that we can compare this against. And we didn't get any results for it. So, I don't want to necessarily want to blame it on that technique, like, you know, it's always possible it was a fluke or we didn't implement it right in some way, but I was like shocked that this did not do anything. Wow, that is interesting. I think I'm pretty sure I've written down in previous journals when I've been wanting to do that. Oh, here's a contingency and this is what I'll overcome and so on and so forth. Uh yeah, I I suppose don't don't stop using it if it works for you, but, you know, look at the academic literature, see what, you know, come to your conclusion, the consensus on it. Yeah. Yeah, I think most people will I you know, combine a bunch of these together for habits, right? And this is the problem that you're not doing a univariate analysis on exactly what contributed to your habit sticking or not sticking. You maybe you had a fruit bowl that you bought that's now out. Oh, well, that's kind of like one of your visual triggers. It's like a post-it note that's kind of lying around and then maybe there was some other thing. So, there's just a lot of different elements that always contribute to this and they're very rarely going to be done in in isolation, which is exactly why we needed you to do your study. Yeah, so we were we were trying to figure this out and then but here's the problem with our original study design. We tested so many things that you could very reasonably say, well, but maybe they were false positives, maybe it was flukes, etc. And so, we wanted to really try to confirm that. So, what we did is we took these five best interventions um that I mentioned already. We packaged them into one tool and it's completely free. You can use it right now if you want. It's called Daily Ritual and it's on our website clearerthinking.org. So, you can go use it, help you form a new habit. And we tested that in a randomized controlled trial. So, this was a new study designed to test that tool. And very happily, it actually succeeded in helping people stick to their habit more compared to the control group. And so, we tracked their habits over 8 weeks and those who used the Daily Ritual tool um stuck to them at a more reliable rate. So, that was really satisfying to see. Oh, yeah. And so, that's a stack of these on top of each other. Yeah, because, you know, it's interesting. In real life, any one thing is probably not going to have like an profound impact. You know, occasionally it does, but usually it's more additive. And so our goal, once we have this initial state where like we've got five promising things, let's just make the stack that is the most promising. And it's even possible that one or two of those doesn't do anything, but we're like, "But the stack, the stack works, you know? We're not We can't be 100% sure every ingredient is helpful." Yeah, I love it. What about valueism? This is your personal philosophy that I have never heard of before, but I think you've had some personal success with. What is valueism? Yeah, so you haven't heard of it cuz I invented it. So, but I invented it, but on the other hand, like, you know, there are many elements of it that have been inspired by lots of other things, so I'll say that. But um so let me start by talking about values because I think that's sort of the core layer of this. And I will say valueism is my personal life philosophy. I've written a series of essays about it if you want to read those. Um it I have found it to be a very fruitful life philosophy, and it's my attempt to really answer the question, "What should you do with your life?" Especially if you don't have some big belief system that you belong to. Like, okay, maybe if you are a Catholic and you believe all of the Catholic ideas, then like maybe that gives you a structure of like how to live your life. I'm not a Catholic, you know, I don't have I don't have that overarching guiding structure. So I'm like, "What should I do with my life? How should I spend my time?" You know, so this is my time to answer that question. So, starting with values. I like to think of values as being differentiated into two types. There's intrinsic values and instrumental values. So intrinsic values are the things we value for their own sake. We value them not just as a means to an end, but we value them fundamentally, right? So an example of this is being happy. Like if you're like, "Oh, I did this thing that made me really happy." And someone's like, "Well, why do you care? Why would you care about being happy?" You'd be like, "I don't know, I just I just value it, right?" Like, there's nothing really deeper than that. You just want to be happy, right? Um whereas instrumental values are things that we value merely because they get us other things. The classic example is money. Imagine you were on a a deserted island, you had tons of money, but it didn't burn, uh so you couldn't make fires with it. You can't spend it on anything. It's not even warm enough to you know make a blanket out of it, right? It would be totally useless, right? So money is you know cash, literally dollars, um have no intrinsic value. They have it lots of instrumental value. You can use them to buy lots of things. You can give them away to help the world, etc. But they're not intrinsically valuable. And the reason that I draw this distinction is because a lot of people waste a lot of time going after things they instrumentally value and they forget that they don't actually intrinsically value these things. So they forget that they're means to an end. They you know and they treat them like they're an end in itself. And I think you know many of us have seen this happen with money for example where someone seems to be mindlessly pursuing money way past the point where it's even causing any positive benefit for them. It's just sort of like they attach to the idea of just making the number go up. Um so okay. So that's the end of the first first base as we think about instrumental values and intrinsic values. I'll stop there to see if you have any questions about that and then I'll go on to the next part of the talk. Okay, cool. Cool. Okay. So then what is valueism? It's a very simple life philosophy. It says basically two steps. One, first work to figure out what you intrinsically value, separate that out from what you instrumentally value. And then once you've done that, step two, try to use effective methods to create what you intrinsically value. That's it. That's our life philosophy. And you might say, "Well, why? What's the point? Why would you go work out your intrinsic values and then try to use effective methods to to create the things you intrinsically value?" Well, it's like because that is the things you deeply value. That's actually what your brain like psychologically finds valuable. So like go do that thing. And when I say it that way, it sounds incredibly stupid and obvious. It's like, "Well, duh." But here's the really crazy thing. As stupid and obvious as it seems, very few people live by this life philosophy. And often when I've told people about that, they're like, "Oh, that makes so much sense. That's like crystallizing this thing that I had in the back of my mind that I like didn't have a precise way of stating, right?" So that's what I'm trying to do is like crystallize this idea and turn it into like a specific life philosophy even though lots of people might be like hovering around this idea but just not have ever like thought about it in that precise way. What are some of the potential pitfalls when someone is taking inventory of their intrinsic values? Yeah, good question. So the the first pitfall is that people often confuse them with their instrumental values. And we actually we spent a lot of time researching this for so again for our website clearerthinking.org we develop this thing called the intrinsic values test. You can go on there it's free. It will help you figure out what your intrinsic values are. And when we first designed this test we ran a study and we put people through a little uh a little thing asking them about their intrinsic values is this intrinsic value is that intrinsic value. And we found that tons of people even though we had like defined intrinsic value for them they put instrumental values instead. Right? They put things that are like oh getting a car or like getting money or uh you know having you know healthy food and it's like no no no those are not and so what we realized is like oh no we actually have to teach people in the tool how to separate these out and it's like a pretty complex process. So we have to end up as part of the tool the first thing you go through is a little mini training module that teaches you how to separate them and actually gives you examples and like quizzes you and then gives you the test. So it helps you really kind of clarify. So that's like the number one first challenge. Um Uh so uh in addition to that I think um another challenge with the with intrinsic values is that they often come in conflict with each other. So um example that has come up with me before is I could be honest with a friend but I know it would hurt their feelings right? And one of my deep intrinsic values is being honest. It's um it's telling the truth. But another deep intrinsic value of mine is not causing suffering and especially not causing suffering for people I care about. And so I think when we actually try to use this as a practice we very quickly will realize that these situations arise where our intrinsic values are in conflict and then we have to start navigating them. And so so in my my kind of sequence of essays about valueism that's like the second essay is like, "What do you do when your intrinsic values conflict with each other?" Yeah, what do you do? Ah, so what I find really helpful is restating the trade-off in terms of your intrinsic values. So, you start with this complicated and I I like this is something I've actually done with friends many times and found really useful. Like a friend will come with a problem they're struggling with. I'll I'll listen to their problem and I'll say, "Hey, it sounds to me like you've got these values, X and Y. And then if you do the first option, you get a bunch of X, but you sacrifice Y. And if you do the second option, you get a bunch of Y, but you sacrifice X." And they're like, "Oh my god, yes, this is exactly what's happening." So, that's my first step is really try to rewrite the problem in terms of like the intrinsic values on either side of the the choices. And then once you've done that, sometimes you're lucky and you'll realize, "Oh, like one side's a clear winner in terms of my values." It was maybe a difficult It maybe it felt like a difficult decision because maybe one of the sides of the choice was painful or stressful or whatever. But when you put it in terms of values, it's just really clear one's the winner. And if you don't do that one, it's because you're not acting like your ideal self, right? So, that's the first thing that can happen and I think like that um is sort of the easier case. The more difficult case is when there's a fundamental trade-off in your values. And now, you're like, "Oh, wait, it turns out there's some people that the first choice would be better for based on their values. And there's some people that the second choice would be better for based on their values. And actually, which one is better is fully dependent on how much I value those different things, right? How much do I value this much honesty versus this much suffering caused to a friend? There is no objective answer. It now is just on me to think about how much I care about these two things. And that takes some of the pressure off because it's like, "Oh, no, this is now about how much I value those things. I'm not like failing to live up to some objective standard." Ah. That's interesting. Do we Do we choose our values? What do you think values come from? That is a great question. Do we choose our values? So, um I think part partly our values are ingrained in us evolutionarily or at least the capacity to have those values. For example, even like a baby doesn't like pain, right? So, that's you know, so some of them are are ingrained and our capacity for the other ones are also, you know, built into us. We have the capacity through our genes. Um but that's not the only thing. After that, we have all these life experiences and I think those impact our values and then I think our culture and what we're taught impact our values. I think our values tend to be pretty stable when you're in your like mid-20s to 30s. Um they can still change a bit, but it tended to not change very much. Um an example of them changing, let's say someone um well, to go back uh you know, the religious example, let's say someone is a devout Catholic and then they have a crisis of faith. That could actually change some of their values. Um or if someone's an atheist and then they suddenly have a experience of God, that could change some of their values. But more or less, they tend to be stable. And some people will ask, well, should I try to change my values? And I think there, the answer is no. Like, your values are the things you fundamentally care about. Why would you change that? Unless in some special cases, you might have a value that says you should change your values. But that's kind of an unusual edge case. Okay. Yeah, it's an interesting one, man. I I've had a lot of conversations over the last few years about values and I think what I originally had as values were they weren't fully instrumental, but they weren't fully intrinsic either. So, it's stuff like uh curiosity, adventure, self-development, excellence. They they feel they don't feel sufficiently firm to me. So, I'm going to have to go and do your uh your tool and and see how I get up with that strategy. to love to hear what you think of our intrinsic values test. But you know, it's interesting the things you mentioned um because there's another class of things that's also important, which are virtues, which I would differentiate from values. So, it might be that it could be that you're thinking of like virtues that you want to live by or you want to reflect. Um but but also it could cross over into um intrinsic values as well. So, for example, I have a I have a intrinsic value of telling the truth and that's highly connected to a virtue of like being an honest person. So, there's you know, it's definitely a tight connection. Uh yeah, interesting. There's So, there's another layer. Taylor Pearson um taught me about this a while ago. He has a list of operating principles that that his life follows and I think that if I was if I was to go complete monk mode and work uh values, virtues, or ethics uh and and operating principles, I think that's a really nice sort of stack that takes you from the philosophical wishy-washy to the strategic tactical spit and sawdust takes up because what you're going to say is um I am faced with this particular problem regularly where my values come into conflict with other values or my values just come into conflict with general discomfort in the world. I need to tell somebody something that they don't want to hear, but one of my values is truth. Therefore, what is the strategic way that I go about things um when I know that I need to tell somebody something within the space of 24 hours from when I have that first thought, I'm going to speak to them. I'm going to do it in a as calm of a way as possible. Something like that, right? Um Like I want to be um I don't know whether this would classes as value, but I'd certainly one of the best life hacks I've ever heard is pay invoices immediately. Like pay bills immediately, pay invoices immediately because if you get known as the sort of person that pays immediately, your suppliers or whoever it is, your landlord's going to like you more, your friends are going to like you more. You you've been out for dinner and someone asks you to PayPal them 100 bucks because they paid on their Amex card cuz they hadn't hit their spending limit for the month. And uh uh it takes you 3 weeks. Like just you get known as the guy that takes 3 weeks to pay somebody back for dinner. Just do it straight away. And it's such a great uh operating principle for life, I think. Pay people what you owe them immediately if you can. It's so you mentioned principles, because actually um last year we released a module on figuring out your life principles. You can also go and take it on our website, clearthing.org. It's a free module, figure out your principles. And um the reason that we developed it is because we realized, just like you're saying, that there's sort of a stack of layers to the person, to you. And in that stack, the way I think about it, at the bottom there's values, right? There's like I think of intrinsic values at the very bottom, like the things that you most fundamentally value. And then you build things on top of that. You build your plans, right? And uh you build your goals. And so what is a good goal? A good goal, from my point of view, is something it's a it's something that's challenging in the future that helps you create the things that you value. And your plans, what's a good plan? A a plan, a good plan is something that helps you achieve your goals reliably. And what is a good decision? It's something that that you know, moves you directionally towards achieving your goals, and so on. And then so where does principles slot in? And so I thought about this a lot, and I think that principles are decision-making heuristics. So if we think about a good decision as something that moves you towards achieving your goals, a principle is a decision-making heuristic or rule of thumb that helps you in practice make your decisions more efficiently and avoiding issues of self-control or self-doubt. Um so, for example, I have a life principle that when I make a mistake, I should acknowledge it and I should try to learn from it. And so if and that's really clarifying for me, because I know it's life principle. I have it written down, I review my life principles periodically. And so let's say I make a mistake, and then like my brain's like, "Well, what should I do now?" I don't even have to think about it. It's like, "Oh, I need to acknowledge it and then you try to learn from it, right?" So um so I find principles to be really powerful, and they're like just another layer in the stack of what it what it is to be you. What about insights in other domains of your life or the world? Have you learned any of those since becoming a fully fledged, paid up valuest? Have you realized other things about the way that the world works or other people operate? Oh man, I mean so so many things. So one thing that I've observed as I think that more about valueism is that there a lot of people that are confused about what their values are versus other people's values. And I think this is especially common for people that either were raised with parents that like put a lot of pressure on them or people that maybe tend to be less assertive and maybe tend to like dictated Um their good their actions get dictated by other people. Um but I'll have I have an anecdote about this which is that a friend of mine was feeling really depressed and she knew it had something to do with her boyfriend and she was really confused and so I sat down with her and she's like, I don't get it. He's such a great guy and yet something about the relationship is deeply unfulfilling to me. And I said, okay, let's talk about it. Like tell me about how he's a great guy. And so she wrote down a list of all his great qualities and I said, okay, cool. Now let's write down your what your values are. And so she wrote down another list and I compared them side by side and I was like, you know what's fascinating? He is a great guy but none of the things are great about him are in line with the what you care about. And then I was like, okay, I have an idea here. Write down your parents' values. So she wrote that down and it like almost perfectly matched her boyfriend and I was like, okay, I think it's pretty clear what's happened here. You're dating your the person your parents want you parent want you to date. And so I think this is a really common phenomenon. We actually live for other people's values. Wow, that is very very interesting. Yeah, it feels like um it feels like there's a relationship here or correlation with the relationship we have with our future self and the relationship that we have with our past self, right? You're existing in the now, you're making goals and plans and even thinking about your values because there will be a future you which is going to benefit from it. That person is going to be more well-rounded and then you also have this continuity bias. What does it mean that I used to do that in the past? How What does it mean that I am the same person that I was in the past even though I feel like a different person like a you know, it's been 7 years since I had that memory. All of my cells have been replaced. I've ship of Theseus my way into like not even existing as the same person anymore. I've got this continuity of consciousness and what's going to happen in future and where am I going to be like it feels like this relationship that we have across time with our self and then the projection of what we could become or would want ourselves to become and then sometimes we can make deals today that our future self has to pay or cash or you know, checks that they have to cash in future. Yeah, there's definitely something going on there. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I think that's a really powerful idea that you just mentioned of like making deals with your future self. It's something that that I do. You know, like for example, a really simple way to pull that off is say, "Okay, you really don't want to do these tax forms. These tax forms are huge pain in the ass, but if you do them, you get to go do this special thing afterwards that you don't normally let yourself do and you get to splurge. And so like, you know, that's what is that? That's just a kind of a deal with your future self and you're like your present self's like, "All right, fine. But I'll do the tax forms." You know, um My I'm actually feeling a values conflict right now because my cat really wants to get out of this room. Get out. Go and get it. Go and get the cat. Where is she? Here we go. Say hi Marilyn. Cats, man. You just can't They they they're only good for half an hour on a pod cast. would be just sitting peacefully in the background and and uh no fan of big fan of dogs and dogs and cats in the background of podcasts though. It's so I don't know why. Um there was this dude Kevin Samuels. He's passed away now, but he used to do um YouTube a lot and he had this you know, one of those uh gyroscopic perpetual motiony type things and you'd spin it on your desk and it would go in kind of a chaotic pattern and he used to have this thing on his desk and he must just give it a kick before he started every video and I promise you I couldn't stop looking at this perpetual motion thing. Got this guy and he's, you know, being expressive and talking and explaining stuff and sometimes even like holding things up. Meanwhile, I'm watching this this perpetual motion machine in the background. So yeah, dogs dogs and cats have the have the same thing. When it comes to being a card-carrying valueist, what are the hardest things about following this philosophy? Where are the hair shirts hiding in your in your ideals? Yeah, I think that one of the hardest things is that when you really pay attention to your values, you realize there's a bunch of ways you're not living according to your values. Um or another way to say that is if you think about who you are and you think about who the what the ideal version of you is like there's ways that you you don't live up to that. The way there's ways that you're being driven by what other people want you to do but that are not in line with your values. There's ways that you're maybe seeking social status when you really your values tell you you should be more focused on something else. Not to say there's anything wrong with caring about social status to some extent but but you maybe you're not living in accordance with your values in that way. There may be ways that you're not being as honest as your values tell you to be and so on. Like here here's a really simple example. I know lots of people who really really care about animals. If they saw like animal being hurt in the street, they would be extremely upset and distraught. And yet they might take actions that contribute to animals being harmed, right? And so, you know, it's like oh wait, if you're trying to live according to your values, like what does that say about you know, the choices you make and the food you eat and so on. And and I think I use that one example because it's a really stark example but I think there are a lot of these things that come up is that reflecting on your values also makes you deeply aware that you're not always living according to your values. What do you think about the usefulness and the role of intuition when it comes to decision-making? Uh good question. Well, yeah, this is this is something that I that I thought about a great deal and you know, I always find it interesting when you have two sides that yell at each other and yet both sides have good points but they never seem to resolve their argument. And so, the two sides that I see yelling at each other on this are you have a lot of people who deeply uh trust their intuitions and then and they really stand behind that. They like they're like, "I didn't used to trust my intuition, but I learned to trust it and things are so much better for me now, right?" Um and they advocate that other people trust it. Um and then when someone says, "Well, how do I decide?" They're like, "Just go with what your gut is telling you, right?" And then there's the other side that are like they tend to be more like rationalistic or or academic and they say, "No, our intuitions are just riddled with biases and it's like, you know, people like constantly telling you to trust your intuition and your intuition is dumb. You need to use rational analysis and be analytic." And like, I look at these two sides and I'm like, "Man, they both have some great points." So, I spent a bunch of time thinking about this. Like, what is really true on this subject? And so, I developed this thing I call the FIRE framework. So, it's the acronym F I R E, FIRE. And it's about when should you trust your gut? When do you trust your intuition? And when should you second-guess your intuition and use a more rational analytical analysis? And so, the the acronym kind of tells you when you can trust your gut. Um and so, the first uh letter F for FIRE, um that stands for fast decisions. And so, you know, imagine you're driving down the highway, you're going 50 mph, and then a car suddenly going the opposite direction swerves into your lane, right? You don't have time to use rational analysis. You will die if you use rational analysis. So, the first time when you have trust your gut is with fast decisions for obvious reasons because our intuition is just so much faster. And you can see this with things like sports or martial arts where at first when they're learning it, they may be doing a lot of thinking, but when they're actually really in the game, um almost all of it is automated and and going with their going with their gut. Okay, the second I is irrelevant decisions. So, let's say you're like, "Oh man, I you know, I'm I'm trying to order a salad, but I just don't know. Should I get carrots in it or not? Like, it is not worth 10 minutes of your life figuring out whether you get carrots in your salad, right? You just go with your gut. Um or this is a really common one. You're trying to figure out what TV show or movie to watch. And like, you ever do this with friends and you spend like an hour trying to pick and you're like, "Oh my god, it's like what a waste of time." Wouldn't it be better if we flipped a coin, right? So, you know, just just uh go with your gut with with an irrelevant decision, right? Okay, so that's the first two times when you should go with your gut. The third one is really interesting and important. Um that's the R for repetitious decisions. So, the idea here is that your intuition is not magic. It is very much not magic, but it is very smart. So, when is it smart? It's smart when it gets to do a thing again and again and it gets feedback. So, to think about this, imagine that you're learning archery. So, you've got your bow and arrow, you're firing at the target. The only problem is you're blindfolded and you also have earplugs. So, you can never find out if you hit the target or not. How long would it take you to learn to be a good archer? I think the answer is infinite time. Forever. Yeah. Yeah, forever. You would never, right? Okay. Um now, let's suppose Okay, let's suppose you get to take the blindfold off, the earplugs off, but because you have a vision problem and a hearing problem, you only have 50% reliability of knowing whether you hit the bull's-eye or not, right? Well, now, maybe you could learn a bit. You could learn a little bit, but it would take so long to learn, right? You might need thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of repetitions. Whereas, if you get to see exactly where you hit on the target each time, after each arrow shot, you're going to learn so much faster. And in fact, eventually, your intuition will get so good, you don't even need to think about it. You can just pull back the bow and fire, you know, a perfect shot once you've done enough. And so, I think this is a good metaphor for how our intuition works. Our intuition is or essentially our, you know, different parts of our mind constantly monitor the world and constantly see what happens and constantly see whether the action we took got to the result we wanted. And so, if you take someone like Magnus Carlsen who's played the you know insanely large number of games of chess, you can drop him into a game of chess and he instantly knows what to do. He does not need to do rational analysis. And he will still absolutely beat you. In fact, there's a wonderful game he plays against three like pretty good chess players where he beats the crap out of all of them and he makes his moves like essentially instantaneously, like within seconds. But the craziest part is he doesn't get to see the board. It's all like memorized in his head during the games. And he beats them all, right? It's so crazy and it's because it actually requires no rational thought for him to play chess. However, let's say he played a new game he's never seen in his life, totally different rules. Maybe it's on a chessboard with totally different rules. He might be a bit better than the average, but he's not going to be very good and his intuitions are actually going to sometimes lead him to do exactly the wrong move, Mhm. He's going to He's going to incorrectly pattern match. This is like that situation in chess. No, it's not, Magnus. It's got nothing to do with chess. He's going to have to keep overriding his intuitions because his his chess mind is going to It's like, "Well, it's a chessboard. It's got chess pieces, right?" And so I think that a lot of the magic of our intuition, the seeming magic, is because our brain is always watching and always learning and it gets really good at things. It gets shockingly good. In fact, it gets so good that sometimes you're like, "I don't even know how I know that thing, but I just know it." And it's because yeah, it's been watching your entire life and learning. A good example of this is sometimes you just get a bad vibe about a person. And like and sometimes they're wrong. You know, first impressions can be wrong, but I think they're right a lot of times, surprisingly often. I think when you get a bad vibe of meeting someone in the first 10 minutes, it's like there's a pretty good chance you picked up on something real. Very interesting. Is that the That's R. That's repetitive. So we'll do the last one, evolutionary decisions. And so this E the E for evolutionary decisions, the idea here is that well, we we're created by evolution, right? That's that's where we came from. And if you look at an animal like a cat or a snake, you notice they have a bunch of reactions that they seem to know how to do and they didn't seem to learn it from their parents, right? Well, we too are animals of a sort, right? And so there are some things we know how to do. Our gut knows how to do them that uh we never had to learn. Um, and so an example of this, if someone puts a steak in front of you and it smells rotten, don't eat it, right? Like that is an evolutionary intuition that you have. Um, if you hear suddenly an extremely loud noise, you will probably jump away before you even realized it. And that is probably a really good decision because the chance that a bunch of like, you know, gold is about to land in your hands is much lower than the chance that you're biting really bad is about to happen to you, right? So that intuition that a really loud noise means something dangerous is occurring is a pretty good intuition. It's not always right, but it's a good intuition. So So there are a whole bunch of these evolutionary ones. But so so that's the idea of the FIRE framework, that these four situations, fast decisions, relevant decisions, repetition decisions, and evolutionary decisions when you can trust your gut. And outside of that is when rational analysis tends to lead to better outcomes. Got you. Have you got any strategies for how people can integrate intuition and subconscious into their more reflective rational decision-making? I think that's probably a lot of what people want. You know, I I understand I probably need to think about this a little bit, but I feel like I'm maybe applying more cerebral horsepower to this than I need to and it's causing me to It's causing me discomfort. I'm I'm sort of weighed down with all of the different thought structures about this thing. I kind of just want to think about it a bit, then feel it, and then go. Yeah, it's a great question because Okay, we say, "All right, well, there are certain times when you want to do reflective decision-making, analytical decision-making, but like how do you do that right?" And I think a common failure mode there is ignoring your intuition. And so where there's a there's a really big distinction between letting your analysis run the show and ignoring your intuition. They're not the same thing. So let's think of an example. Um, imagine that you meet someone and you have a bad reaction to them like in the a few minutes of meeting them, right? And then you're thinking about it later. And um, now your your intuition there has some real information, important information. And some people they'll think rationally and they'll be like, well, but they didn't really do anything wrong and if I like replay the conversation in my head, there wasn't any specific thing they said that like indicate they were a bad person or whatever. But to ignore your intuition there is a dumb idea. At the same time, to let it completely determine your view of this person. If you go around badmouthing this person now, that's probably it not warranted either. And so it's like the the right way to do reflection is to incorporate the intuition and learn from it what you can, use it as a source of information, but not let let let it necessarily completely run the show, right? Um, and so so how do you do that? Well, part of it is that you can try to hone in on what your intuition is picking up on, right? And I find thought experiments can be really useful with this. Um, so you could say, for example, let's say this person rubbed you the wrong way. You could think to yourself, hmm, well, was it the first part of the conversation? Like if I just had the first part of the conversation, would I have had a negative vibe? You're like, no, no, no, actually that would have been okay. Um, you know, was it something about like their facial expression? You know, like let's say that they had been smiling, do you think I would have processed it differently? And so you can kind of try to like, you know, zoom in on like what your intuition is picking up on. It's a little bit like if you're studying like what a neural net is doing, it's like, how did your intuition is kind of like a neural net. It's just this giant network that's doing these incredibly complex operations, but they're kind of hidden. And then later, you know, AI researchers are like, well, what on earth was this neural net picking up on? How did it decide what's a dog and what's a cat? And they'll try to like back that out and they'll try to say, well, it seemed to be honing in on these parts of the image. And so maybe it's picking up on whiskers or, you know, Yeah. It's interesting to think about how uh, intuition and uh, sort of cognition battle against each other. And after a while, I've certainly found this with myself. I can end up talking myself out of or into pretty much any sensation or emotion. And then after a while, you don't even have a relationship with your intuition anymore. You have a relationship with the story that you told yourself about what your intuition meant, which is now taking it from the realm of intuition into the realm of cognition. And now you're trying to think, what does it mean that I'm the sort of person that thinks that I'm the sort of person that takes their intuition into the realm of cognition. Yeah, that that spiral is a useless. Yeah, and it's really tricky and I think a lot of people struggle with this. I I have a friend who had some really traumatic things happen to her and she found that it became increasingly difficult to hone in on her intuition and to trust it. And I think what happens sometimes is your tissue intuition can kind of get noisy. Like let's say you have a traumatic event and you're feeling fear a lot of the time. Maybe you're feeling fear all the time. And then suddenly it's like, well okay, I'm afraid. Does that mean something bad's about to happen or is it just like my, you know, hyperactive system is all fired up, right? And then you can learn and then it with that you can start to learn to not trust your intuition, right? Which is a very which is also really bad. It's like you have these two incredibly powerful tools. You've got your your power of analysis and reasoning and you've got your intuition. And some people are saying, no, just leave one tool in the toolbox. You're like, are you crazy? Why would you ever do that? You've got these two really powerful tools. Learn to be a master of both of them, right? Yeah, you say we we've spoke offline about the importance of becoming wise. Something that you that you care about a lot as well. Why do you think it's so important and what's your definition of wisdom? Ah, yes. Well, I think this is really relevant just because of the, you know, the name of your podcast. I actually wanted to ask you. Like, so you got a podcast, it's called Modern Wisdom. What is What is wisdom to you? Like, why why did you call it that? Uh the reason I called it that was I wanted to try and have something that felt sufficiently connected to the accumulated human knowledge bank that I was I wanted to be dipping into, but that it was purposefully built for the mismatched contemporary environment that we find ourselves in, right? That I got toward the end of my 20s and I didn't really understand myself or how the world worked or how I was supposed to behave and and what my values should be and and what ethics were and I I I felt like I should know these things, that it wasn't unknown knowledge. I wasn't asking questions for which there were no answers that were known. It was just that I needed to be shown the way and then importantly the tactical/applied element of it is okay, and what does this mean to take some, you know, Aristotelian ethic and then try and apply it to a world for which it wasn't originally written. You know, I think a lot of people know things, but when it comes to understanding their applic- it's it's rough. Like people get stuck, you know, they've got the quote written on their whiteboard or or they've it's their background of their phone screen saver, but ultimately like the spit and sawdust of whether or not this thing happens is its applicability. It's strategically, tactically, can I actually apply this thing? When it comes to wisdom, I think your actions having the consequences that you intended them to have is probably not far off for me. Um like intention, action, and outcome being aligned feels like something that's right, but there's one bit that's missing there, which is what did you intend to intend? There's like one step above. Yeah, there's one more step that I've missed out of that. You would have thought after 700 episodes of a show called Modern Wisdom that I would have some beautiful succinct definition of it. And I did for a while, but I actually found that having some cookie-cutter, maybe it was written by me, it probably some Frankenstein's monster bastardized from like a bunch of different people. I actually found that that was a bit constricting uh because I was I had a ready-made answer when people asked me this question. I had a ready-made answer that I churned out that didn't require me to assess do I still believe that this is true. And uh I had a conversation with Sam Ovens, this dude who uh spent a lot of time creating internet content, and he actually stopped doing all content for the same reason. He found that he was making proclamations on his YouTube videos and on his podcasts that his real-world self felt the obligation to live up to. So, he was saying things in the virtual world that him in the real world then felt the need to actually go out and do. And then he was like being held hostage by statements that he'd made, and he had this very sort of strange persona, personality relationship going on, and and and he felt the tension with that. So, just generally as a rule, I think um it's nice to have it's kind of like the the to bring it full circle, it's kind of like the Myers-Briggs of of personal development. Like, it's nice to have a succinct, simple way somebody asks you in a in an elevator uh you like an M N I N T J or whatever, but the actual deeper version of this is to have the sliding scale, which is more like Big Five. It's like, "Okay, what do I actually think about this?" Used to have this idea, it was about action and intention and and and outcome kind of being the same, but you know, I've got this other bit that I've added in that it doesn't feel like it's a part of it. So, I think that's I think just as a meta meta meta rule, I think that's really important to continually assess the um like commonplace book answers that you have for questions that you regularly end up talking about. Um and and assess those pretty frequently, and periodize it. Like, give yourself an answer, sit back, rely on that for a little while, then fight with some other definitions or some other terms that you're looking at and then and then come back in. But, yeah, that's my that's my idea around wisdom in the name and and the definition. I I I really like that. I think you captured a lot of the critical elements. And what I find really fascinating about wisdom is it seems like one of the most important things to to become wise. And yet, it's very hard to come up with a definition that people will agree with. And there's so many different definitions flying around. And so, that intrigued me. And so, I started doing analysis of different definitions. And I ended up coming with a up with a bunch of different definitions, each inspired sort of by different thinkers or different ways of looking at the problem. Um so, I'll just mention three of them. That uh the first the first is this idea of wisdom as self-consistency. And this one was inspired by the work of Justin Shovlin and um uh Elliot McKernan. And so, the idea here is that to be wise is to have a consistency between the key elements of yourself. So, consistency between your values, your beliefs, and your actions. And so, an example would be imagine that you value being honest, but you're being dishonest, right? Well, well, immediately that's a that's a your values are not aligned with your actions, right? So, you're not being consistent. You're not being wise. Um or imagine that you believe you should be best if you became a doctor, but you're actually pursuing being a lawyer, right? So, there that is actually a conflict again between your beliefs this time and your actions. And so, that those three pieces all being in alignment is wisdom. So, that that's kind of the the first idea. Any reaction to that one? That feels that feels not too dissimilar to me. Uh values, beliefs, actions as uh like intention, action, outcome. Um I suppose the one thing that's missing there would be would be the outcome. And I think that that's a very important part because um what you want from any wisdom philosophy is to be able to accurately predict the impact of the things that you're going to do. I think that's super super important, and I think that uh an awful lot of wisdom comes down to being able to achieve the ends that you meant to, and to know the ends that you mean to get to. Yeah, that's a great point, and actually that's really tied into the the second definition of wisdom, which I which I I call wisdom as causal control. And um this is inspired by uh work of Vervaeke and Ferraro. Good guy, John Vervaeke, been on the podcast. He's a modern wisdom alumni. Oh, nice. I don't know if he would agree with this, but but it's inspired by his work. So, um it's this idea that wisdom is about both the ability and the propensity to consider the complex situation that you're in, and then through your understanding of yourself, the world, and other people produce what are on average beneficial outcomes, right? So, there's a swirl of like complexity, but you kind of sift through that, and you say, "Ah, if you take this action in this complex situation, on average, that will lead to good outcomes." And it has to be on average, because the world's probabilistic, right? There's no way, for example, at poker to win every time. The best you can do is win on average, and so much of life is like that. So, yeah, that sort of to me that sort of captures that second piece that you were actually referring to. 100% wisdom is knowledge multiplied by goodness. What's that? Ah, yeah, so this is sort of sometimes you'll hear people say things like wisdom is, you know, uh knowledge times altruism or knowledge times goodness, right? And so, I thought about that a bunch, and I was like, "Okay, there may be something to that." And so, first of all, I think we can say that like knowledge is an element of wisdom, right? Like I think most people would say if you you know, if you don't have any knowledge, like it's hard to be wise, right? At the same time, being good seems to be an element of wisdom, right? If you are totally evil or you're totally self-serving, it's it seems be strange to call you wise. And so, we can say, "Okay, wisdom seems to be related to these two things, knowledge and goodness, right? But how is it related to those two things? Is it more like a sum of those two things? Well, if it were just a sum of those two things, then you could still get a high wisdom score by being really knowledgeable if you even if you were super evil. And that doesn't seem right. You're using all your knowledge just to, you know, serve yourself or something. Uh, or you could get a really good wisdom score score by being really a good person but knowing nothing, being completely ignorant. That doesn't seem right, either. So, it seems like it's more like a product, like multiplying knowledge and goodness together. And the reason is because zero times anything is zero, right? So, if you have zero knowledge, no matter how good you are, you still get a zero wisdom. And even if you're 0.9, you're less knowledgeable. Your your wisdom is less than your knowledge if you're bad or if you're not as good as you could be. exactly. So, they multiply together. And so, you actually need both and then and they kind of like complement each other. And so, that's that's this third idea, kind of an intuitive notion of wisdom that I like. It's interesting that there's this sort of benevolence um to wisdom, right? It's axiomatically, from first principles, leaves the world in a better place than it was when it found it. That there is I think that the goodness part is is pretty important. Um maybe there's an element of assumption that sufficient understanding of intention and action uh would fold goodness in, like axiomatically. Like this is something that should be a part of any sufficiently knowledgeable system. They should also arrive at goodness. And although I'm sure that there's some philosophical theory that literally would say that that may be the way that it works, functionally, I don't think it is. Like you have to design this for the idiot apes that are going to use it. And I think that goodness is sufficiently important that it bears adding it in as another factor of your the wisdom equation. Uh all right, we've I just want to say that's it's such an interesting point. And this is something I actually I often debate with my guests on the Clear Thinking Podcast, where they'll make an argument that like goodness is this fundamental force in the universe or like is an objective thing and I'm like no no no it's like about your own values. And so I think there's two ways to arise at this goodness piece. One is to say, you know, objectively like if you're sufficiently intelligent you'll figure out that being good is like is objectively right. And but the other way to get at it which is more the way I take is like actually if you reflect on your values almost everyone cares about being good in different ways whether it's being honest or reducing suffering or you know, helping your your loved ones. And so the goodness comes about because our value almost all of us have values that involve goodness. Interesting. So do you think on average that most of the people who end up doing evil things are doing that because of an instrumental value? Uh that is such a good question. There are a bunch of different types of evil. Um so one type of evil is what I call philosophical disorder. Um a philosophical disorder is when you deeply believe something important that is both false and harmful to believe. And so take an example of someone that they should go blow up a building. Right? That is someone doing evil from a philosophical disorder. They have a false harmful belief that they're executing. But that person might be like really kind and altruistic. They might think they're saving the world, right? That is an extremely different type of evil than someone who is evil because they only care about their own interests. They literally are completely indifferent to the interests of all other people other than themselves. Um and while there are some people like that there are some people that only care about their own interests and are completely indifferent to the interests of anyone else other than themselves. They're actually extremely rare. They're extremely rare. And I think actually most evil in the world is not caused by that kind of person funnily enough even though you might you might think that it that it would be. Yeah. Uh my friend Gwenda really smart guy from the UK has a bunch of different things about evil he says uh the world's few evil people cannot enact their plans without the world's many stupid ones. Therefore stupidity he a far greater threat than evilness. And I think that in some regards that's quite true. There's a another insight about how the world has very few original thinkers and most people end up being kind of marionetted by whatever their favorite influencer does. So you get this kind of memetic echo cascade thing going on. Um but yeah, I would agree. You know, if you look at most of the super super evil people from history, if you actually look at what they were trying to do, they were driven by what they saw as a benevolent goal. The externalities of the path that they took to achieve that goal ended up in massive amounts of suffering and and reprehensible behavior. But I don't know I don't know how many people live on this earth who are like like from first principles, oh they're evil. Like intrinsically, they value harming people and causing suffering and discomfort and pain and all this sort of stuff. It's mostly I am on a righteous path. I have It's the like Thanos, right? It's like all roads lead back to Thanos. Like I have an outcome I believe is is worthwhile. But the route to get there is one that many other people would say is evil. Well, you know, it's it's fascinating. So we ran this study on intrinsic values and we had people we we tell people what they were and then we had them submit what they thought theirs were. We got 3,000 submissions. We looked through them, we deduplicated them, and categorized them. I don't think there was a single person there that like had an intrinsic value of harming other people. Right? So I'm not saying it's it's literally impossible. There might be some people out there that like actually their values are harming others. But I think actually in practice, the most evil fundamentally evil people it's just that they don't have intrinsic values of helping others or, you know, you know, but they're I I think even them they they like they don't have an intrinsic value of harming others, which, you know, honestly, thankfully, right? Like think about how bad that would be. And it's fascinating because if you watch cartoons or movies about evil, it's almost always the case that they actually have a seem to have a value of harm, which is bizarre. Like why do we cook up these fictional worlds that have nothing to do with reality? Well, it's because it simplifies it down, right? Um That being said, I was thinking about Lion King, you know, the Lion King, the uh Mufasa and Scar. The reason that Scar is is such a a dick is he wants the control of Pride Rock, right? He wants to take that. But that being said, there's you know, there's many all of the um evil guys throughout most of the Avengers, except for Thanos, actually. He would makes for like an interest He's another interesting case, right? Like he's got this what he sees is a benevolent goal, but isn't in the end. But uh yeah, so many of the cartoon movie super villains just have Oh, he's just the bad guy, right? Um one of my friends mentally want to cause harm, yeah. Yeah, one of my friends is doing this really interesting study at the moment to do with um physical attractiveness and uh perceived uh goodness. So, like the goodness of a person, and um if you look at, you know, many stories, popular culture, uh the bad person has some form of physical disfigurement, right? It's like a a physical manifestation of this malignant internal uh state of philosophy. And um yeah, he's going to he's going to run this this uh facial analysis to like Eve Psych uh based facial analysis study, which I think will be really interesting. Uh that's really interesting. I I hope he finds that there's no correlation between people. Something tells me that it's not going to happen. Something tells me that it could be an uncomfortable realization. I feel like one of the a form of prejudice that is very accepted in society, and I think should be much less accepted, is people basically on unattractive people. Like I just think that's, you know, nobody chooses to have You know, do you think about how arbitrary the little bumps in our faces are that determine whether we're good-looking versus average versus bad-looking. with that, it's it's not just the on the people who are not good-looking. There is the even if you don't actively on the person that isn't good-looking by giving benefits to the person that is good-looking, it is like by omission rather than commission still damaging the person that isn't. And much as that degree of egalitarianism in the world would be maybe useful, I think it is we're way too evolutionarily kind of locked in for that. All right, we've got three more. Wisdom as a virtue. What's that? Ah, wisdom as virtue. So, this is the idea that being wise is about demonstrating the certain virtues. You know, the virtue of courage, the virtue of honesty, the virtue of kindness. And so, I think this is like kind of a very traditional view of wisdom. It's like about who you are as a person, what you manifest, rather than sort of a more intellectual view of wisdom. Yeah. What do you think about this? Yeah, this is like the medieval uh hero story. This is like Shrek. Shrek wisdom, right? Like, I'm going to do the thing. Um yeah, I'm looking at some of the things here. Factual knowledge, self-knowledge and understanding, first-hand experience, common sense, compassion, altruism, impartiality, non-attachment, objectivity, epistemic humility, courage. Yeah, the this is this is definitely like the trad con side of wisdom. I wonder whether this would be folded into the goodness uh part of your wisdom equation. Maybe not, you know, like is impartiality, non-attachment, courage, like is courage a part of goodness? It's probably not. You would say that most people who are courageous are good, but not all people that are good are courageous. So, yeah, I think um I think this is probably this is probably useful, and you do need to pay a little bit of lip service to the um like vestigial wisdom uh world, you know? Like, oh, there's a nods to kind of what it what it was and and maybe traditionally what it would have been considered. Right. Yeah, I think that's right. And you can also think of it as a bit of a recipe. Because if you take this really abstract definition of like, you know, looking at all the complex causes and picking out the right action to take, like, okay, well, how the hell do you do that? It's like, well, maybe you become the kind of person that is courageous so that you can take the right action, whereas other people won't take the right action. And you become the kind of person that's uh you know, unbiased or fair but so that you can like evaluate things, you know, even-handedly and so on. So, it's a little bit of like, how who do you become in order to be able to do that? Um which I think can be a useful way of thinking about things. Awesome. Okay, wisdom as such. Yeah, so I think this is one of the more abstract ones. Um So, it's basically about exploring the essential truths about life, the cause and effect of things, and then basically applying these insights to both theoretical and real-life situations. And so, it's like, think of it as like um uh you're like thinking about the big questions, the important questions. You're not focused on the, you know, unimportant things. You're focused on the big things. And then you search to actually find those answers. And then once you get those answers, you use them. You like apply them as tools. And so, I think the emphasis of this definition of wisdom is it's really more of like wisdom as a process that you go through rather than like a thing that you do. Right. Wisdom is a process rather than as a thing that you do. Well, Right. So, it's not like, oh, you have a difficult decision and now you suddenly act wise. It's no no, it's like wisdom is like the fact that you've spent your whole life pursuing the answers to the big things and then like, you know, figuring out how to incorporate them. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it it it almost so speaks to the the compounding effect of wisdom. This maybe plays into the the elder druid style person sat around the campfire bestowing his stories on the youth, so to speak, that it's this accumulated thing that you continue to to pick up throughout your life. Exactly. Exactly. By the way, I you know, I think it's just something about your audience that you want me to go through all these different nations because I was like, there's no way we're going to get through more than three of these. You do not know this audience. They're like, tell me what If If we stopped now, if we stopped now and only did five of the six, it would be a there would be a barrage of very, very bad comments. So, the final one, wisdom as perspective. Okay. So, this is about the idea of viewing things from multiple vantage points. I don't know if you've ever like had a guest talk about like spiral dynamics or this kind of idea. No, I really want to get into it. Do you know anyone that's like super, super good at at communicating spiral dynamics? Uh well, I'd have to tell you my take on it, but I don't know No, I don't know I don't know who the the best expert to talk on it. Um This is a what's-his-face, transcend and include, right? I don't I don't know that that name doesn't ring a bell. There are actually a bunch of people who've written in different ways about these related concepts. Yeah. Okay, interest I Is it not Ken Wilber? Is Ken Wilber not like a big part That is Yeah, he's one of the like founders that connects to you. Good. Okay, anyway, so wisdom as perspective, spiral dynamics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there's this idea in spiral dynamics of kind of these uh these scientists call them different colors of like ways of seeing the world that like the way of seeing the world when you're like a lone self trying to survive versus in a small tribe and so on. And uh and as you get near the top, I think it's often it's like the second to last stage, there's the stage where you see all the stages below. You see all the other ways of looking at the world that have come before, whether you're in a tribe or a big civilization or an individual alone in the woods, and then you incorporate all of them in your worldview, and you kind of see the strengths and the weakness of each of them. So, this is wisdom as perspective. It's like you you're able to take on every, you know, lens and kind of triangulate between all of them. And I think that's a, you know, it's an interesting It's an interesting take. It's definitely that I aspire to try to do. Um I don't know if it captures all of wisdom, but I think it captures sort of an interesting piece of it. Mhm. Yeah, what would what would wisdom be like if you didn't have wisdom as perspective as one of the uh arms of this six-legged octopus? Yeah, I think that I think you know, the the danger there is that like you're stuck in one perspective, right? Like maybe it's a wise perspective, but then you can't step outside of it, right? Whereas like wisdom as perspective is like you could see the strengths and weaknesses of every way of looking at this problem. And then you can balance them and you can like take the good bits and and you can switch between them and um Ah, yeah. It's uh it did it does not surprise me that um people who want to try and be wise in life have a a nightmare. I mean, look at the six incredibly high hurdles that you've just decided to define for how everybody needs to be you know, okay, you want to be wise? Well, here is this gauntlet of hell that you need to go through. Um but I one of the like tactical ways to do this certainly from my life like a lot of the things that you go through that uh to me intrinsically rewarding. Um you know, knowledge, uh causal control, self-consistency. Uh when I haven't had these things in my life have been some of the times that I've felt the worst about myself. You know, when I haven't felt like I've been able to enact change, when I've had an external locus of control, when I'm not self-consistent, my actions and my intentions and my beliefs and my values and then my outcomes also they're all over the place. Uh like my knowledge when I'm not increasing my knowledge, I'm not learning more, if I even increase my knowledge but use it in a manipulative way, I learn neuro-linguistic programming but do it to like distract someone while I steal a bar of chocolate or something like that. That wouldn't feel particularly good to me. Uh and then yeah, wisdom is a virtue as well. I've really enjoyed this sort of accumulation uh cumulative effect uh over time. So, I think wisdom just as a word, presuming that people have the right set of definitions of it, is something that's probably pretty easy to actually encourage yourself to chase down because the process at each single step of the way makes you feel pretty good about yourself, it makes your life better, and it makes the world around you better, too. It's like pretty a universal panacea for most problems. Yeah, I think it's definitely gratifying to pursue these. So, it doesn't have to be grueling. Of course, you're never going to achieve these things, right? It's an impossibility. These are These are ideals to to aspire to. And if you do well on even one of these definitions, I think you're doing great. So, I think trying to assess all six definitions seems Yeah, that's a lot. Hell yeah. Spencer Greenberg, ladies and gentlemen. Spencer, I'm so glad that we got introduced, man. We got linked up by mutual friend William MacAskill, and he said, "I know that you guys are going to get on well." Super, super impressed, and your website is is awesome. There's tons and tons of resources on there. So, why should people go if they want to keep up to date with all the things that you're doing? Oh, thank you so much for having me on. I'm really really grateful. This was such a fun conversation. Um so, if you want to hear more from me, I have a podcast called the Clearer Thinking Podcast. Um we also have a website, clearerthinking.org. We have over 70 completely free tools you can use that we offer as a public service, from measuring your intrinsic values to helping you form healthy habits with our daily ritual tool, and you know, 68 others. So, we'd love for you to check it out. Hell yeah. Spencer, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. 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