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Spencer Greenberg and clinical psychologist Jeremy Stevenson set out to answer one question: what are all the psychological strategies you can use to improve your life? They read over a hundred self-improvement books, surveyed more than 20 types of therapy, and found that everything collapsed into twelve high-level strategies - the basis of their new book, The 12 Levers.

We start with Spencer's life philosophy, valuism: figure out what you intrinsically value, then take effective actions to create it. That turns out to be harder than it sounds, because our brains don't cleanly separate what we truly value from what we want as a means to something else. It also leads to a surprising finding from his research about the kinds of values that people have. We discuss additional questions about valuism, and Spencer also includes an analogy to a cheese-fetching robot.

We then dive into a discussion of his book, starting with how it's organized. From there: a worry technique most people have never heard of, why behavior change usually fails for a different reason than you'd guess, how you build a rigorous book on a field that went through a replication crisis, why he reads the Dodo Bird verdict differently than most people do, what today's chatbots get wrong about therapy, and why almost none of this is taught in school.

Guest: Spencer Greenberg has a PhD in applied math from NYU and co-founded one of the first financial firms to use machine learning. He left finance to start Spark Wave, which runs psychology research and builds products from it, including ClearerThinking.org, ⁠Ten Conditions for Change⁠ and One Helpful Idea. He hosts the podcast Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, and he's the co-author, with clinical psychologist Jeremy Stevenson, of The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life.

Books mentioned (paid links):

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

00:55 Focus and Follow-Through

03:45 Intrinsic Values and Valuism

06:22 Should Values be Taken As-Is

11:46 Spencer's Intrinsic Values

15:18 How to Have Better Conversations

17:15 The Twelve Levers Framework

20:16 Worry Time and Rumination

24:35 What's Missing from the Book

29:03 Evaluating Psychological Evidence

34:07 Turning Ideas Into Action

37:17 Self-Help, Coaching and Therapy

43:01 The Dodo Bird Verdict

46:11 AI and Self-Improvement

51:20 Life Skills and the Education System

54:32 Recommended Books and Closing

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