TLDR
This week I interviewed my very good friend, Spencer Greenberg, who just published a blockbuster book with his co-author, clinical psychologist Jeremy Stevenson. Their new book is The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life. I also created a comprehensive AI skill to help you apply the book’s lessons in your day-to-day life. Whenever you trigger the skill or talk to AI about something the book could be helpful for, the skill helps you work through one of the book’s recommended interventions.
Interview Overview
Every year, 15,000 newly published self-help books promise people better lives if they apply the author’s techniques, triggering another round of fads. From waking up early to cold plunges to mastering habit protocols to adopting mindsets like Stoicism, the number of things we could do to improve our lives seems to be endless.
Counterintuitively, the sheer volume of techniques can have the opposite of the intended result. This can lead to overwhelm, FOMO, and anxiety. Put differently, the scarce resource is no longer information. It’s a trustworthy map, and the judgment to know which move a given moment calls for.
The 12 Levers is the first serious attempt I’ve seen to compress the entire territory of self-improvement into a map you can hold in your head, built by the people best positioned to grade the evidence honestly. (True to form, the book ends with an appendix ranking the evidence behind each lever, including where it’s thin.)
If you’re interested in finding the signal in the noise so you can focus on the few things that matter for you, then you’ll want to hear this interview and purchase Spencer and Jeremy’s book.
About The Authors
Spencer is one of the most rigorous and systematic people working in self-improvement today. He earned a PhD in applied math, founded a machine-learning hedge fund, and then built Clearer Thinking, a research organization that has run more than 75 studies and created over 80 free psychological tools used by hundreds of thousands of people. Through a project called Transparent Replications, his team also replicates studies from top psychology journals (chosen by a random number generator) to test whether the findings actually hold up.
His co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, also has a PhD and is a clinical psychologist who has treated hundreds of clients across thousands of therapy sessions at his practice.
Inside The Research Process That Simplified The Greatest Of All Time Self-Help Advice
Spencer and Jeremy set out to find every useful self-improvement technique in existence.
They started with the books that shaped the culture, like How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), The 7 Habits, and Atomic Habits. Then they pushed outward into the obscure corners of the genre. They worked through 23 schools of therapy starting with the well-known ones: first CBT, the most validated therapy in the world; then narrative therapy and coherence therapy; and finally, methods so obscure that most therapists haven’t heard of them, hunting for techniques that had never escaped clinical training manuals.
Next, every time an author or therapist said “do this,” they extracted the technique into a spreadsheet. They purposefully ignored stories and philosophies. At 459 techniques, they hit saturation: nothing new was appearing.
When they sorted the pile, everything collapsed into 12 moves. Twelve underlying strategies, repackaged over and over with new names, new stories, and new branding. Every morning routine, therapy acronym, and productivity protocol you’ve ever tried maps onto one of them.
Spencer and Jeremy call them levers: the broad strategies for improving your life, each containing a set of specific techniques. (Think of “lifting free weights” as a lever, and the bench press as one technique inside it.)
If you’ve ever felt like you’re drowning in advice, this is your way out: the toolkit is finite. You don’t have to keep up with the infinite scroll of self-improvement. You can just learn all twelve moves.
Over 78 minutes, Spencer and I got into…
Why 40 to 50 percent of papers in top psychology journals failed to replicate.
The one lever Spencer would tell you to pull first.
The most proven cure for insomnia, which almost nobody has heard of.
How scheduling “worry time” helps you worry less.
The failure mode of AI advice that Spencer named “light gassing” (it’s the opposite of gaslighting, and if you ever ask AI about your relationships, you need to know it).
Why the placebo effect is real but much weaker than you’ve been told.
What 3,000+ survey submissions revealed about intrinsic values, and how chasing the wrong ones can quietly cost you a decade.
How invisible loops freeze our growth.
The four categories of things you can actually change: your body, your thoughts, your attention, and your communication.
How to become better at thinking.
Spencer’s personal rule: always have one or two self-experiments running.
Take Action
Step #1: Watch the interview (free)
The interview is 78 minutes
Get interview resources (interview transcript, links to learn more, AI timestamps, AI chapter summaries)
Step #2: Get the book
The 12 Levers is out now in hardcover, ebook, and audio: grab it on Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere books are sold.
Step #3: Get the 12 Levers skill
The hardest part of the book isn’t understanding the levers. It’s knowing which one to pull when you’re standing in the middle of your own problem. We didn't want you to just watch this interview and move on, so we built a Claude skill that puts Spencer and Jeremy's framework to work inside your AI.
When you bring the 12 Levers skill to a problem, it runs the book’s diagnostic process to figure out what kind of problem you’re actually facing. A recurring loop? A values or direction question? A goal you can name but can’t reach? Then it:
Recommends the lever that fits, by number and name, so you learn the framework’s vocabulary as you go
Offers you 2 or 3 of the book’s top techniques for pulling that lever and lets you pick the one that feels most doable, because the repertoire is the point
Tells you the honest evidence rating for each technique, using the book’s own labels
Warns you about that lever’s failure mode (like exposure quietly undermined by safety behaviors, or reframing that slides into forced positive thinking)
Coaches you on one small first action you can take today
Points you to the chapter that teaches you the lever in depth, plus the matching free tool at clearerthinking.org where one exists
It’s good for questions like:
Why do I keep having the same fight with my partner?
How do I stop doomscrolling at midnight?
I can’t decide whether to take this job.
I don’t know what I want anymore.
How can I be more present with my kids?
Anything where you’d normally reach for a self-help book but not know which one.
If you run the 12 Levers skill in Claude Code or Cowork, it also keeps a private “lever log” on your own machine, tracking which levers you’ve pulled, which techniques you’ve chosen in the past, what you said helped, and which levers you haven’t tried yet, so you can see your patterns over time.
Two honest notes, because honesty is this framework’s signature:
First, the skill is a companion to the book, not a substitute for it. Every session points you back to a chapter, and the chapter teaches you the lever well enough to pull it yourself for the rest of your life.
Second, this is self-help, not therapy. The authors are clear that these tools can complement professional treatment but shouldn’t replace it, and the skill says so when it matters.
There are two ways to get the skill:
Become a paid member of this newsletter. Paid members can simply scroll to the bottom of this post for the download and install instructions. You can subscribe here.
Buy the 12 Levers book. Buy the book in any format by August 10. Then email a screenshot of your receipt to support@thoughtleader.school, and we’ll send you the skill.
Interview Resources
Interview Transcript
Learn More
AI Timestamps
AI Chapter Summaries
Interview Transcript
Learn More
AI Timestamps
1. Spencer’s Path From Math to Psychology — 0:00–0:03
2. The Replication Crisis and Building The 12 Levers — 0:03–0:08
3. Lever One: Unraveling Root Causes and the ABC Method — 0:08–0:13
4. Self-Help Books vs. AI, and Shifting Trends in Self-Improvement — 0:13–0:17
5. The Truth About the Placebo Effect — 0:17–0:21
6. Self-Help, Rising Mental Health Struggles, and Evolutionary Mismatch — 0:21–0:24
7. AI’s Impact on Self-Improvement, Coaching, and “Light Gassing” — 0:24–0:31
8. Preparing for the AI Wave: The Overconfident Intern — 0:31–0:36
9. Psychedelics, Emerging Therapies, and the Need for Caution — 0:36–0:40
10. The Body-Mind Connection: Breathing, Exercise, and Sleep Restriction — 0:40–0:45
11. How to Use the Book: Root Causes and Intrinsic Values — 0:45–0:50
12. AI, Meaning, and Work in a Post-Job World — 0:50–0:55
13. Who Should Read The 12 Levers, and the Book’s Bonuses — 0:55–0:57
14. Worry Time: Taming Chronic Worry — 0:57–1:00
15. Feedback Loops: Why Psychological Struggles Get Stuck — 1:00–1:05
16. The Four Things You Actually Control — 1:05–1:11
17. Personal Experimentation and Spencer’s Self-Experiments — 1:11–1:17
18. Closing Thoughts — 1:17–1:18
AI Chapter Summaries
1. Spencer’s Path From Math to Psychology — 0:00–0:03
Michael opens the interview by welcoming Spencer and asking him to trace the path that led to his new book. Spencer explains that after a math PhD at NYU and building a machine learning hedge fund, he was looking for an application area for his technical skills and landed on psychology around 15 years ago, drawn to the opportunity to bring a mathematical, rigorous lens to a field he saw as full of room for improvement.
2. The Replication Crisis and Building The 12 Levers — 0:03–0:08
Spencer describes psychology as a much earlier-stage science than fields like physics, citing the replication crisis, where a large share of top-journal findings from 20 years ago failed to replicate. He discusses his Transparent Replications project, which randomly selects recent papers and attempts to redo their studies, and introduces “importance hacking”: a subtler, newer problem where legitimate results are made to seem far more significant than they actually are, fooling both readers and peer reviewers.
3. Lever One: Unraveling Root Causes and the ABC Method — 0:08–0:13
Asked for the single most valuable technique from the 12 levers, Spencer points to “Unravel the Causes,” illustrated with a car-repair metaphor: without a real diagnosis, people randomly swap parts instead of fixing the actual problem. He introduces the ABC method (Activating event, Beliefs/thoughts, Consequences) as a simple diagnostic tool, and shares the story of a woman whose seemingly psychological symptoms turned out to be carbon monoxide poisoning — a reminder to consider biological causes too. He notes the ABC method traces back to early cognitive-behavioral therapy.
4. Self-Help Books vs. AI, and Shifting Trends in Self-Improvement — 0:13–0:17
The conversation turns to why Spencer and his co-author focused on self-help books rather than only academic research, since that’s where most real-world techniques originate. Spencer argues that a well-crafted book is itself a highly designed intervention, which is different from what an AI can summarize on demand, so books retain value even as AI becomes more capable. He also traces how self-help trends rise and fall with cultural moods, criticizing a common “I fixed myself with one trick, so can you” genre as an unhealthy, overpromising pattern.
5. The Truth About the Placebo Effect — 0:17–0:21
Spencer explains that the placebo effect is real but often works best in self-fulfilling situations, like performance anxiety. He argues the effect is widely overestimated because studies conflate it with other factors such as regression to the mean — conditions like the common cold improve on their own, regardless of any placebo. Personally, Spencer avoids leaning on placebo-like self-deception because he deeply values truth and finds manufactured self-belief uncomfortable, even though he acknowledges it can genuinely help others.
6. Self-Help, Rising Mental Health Struggles, and Evolutionary Mismatch — 0:21–0:24
Michael asks how rising self-help content squares with rising rates of anxiety and depression. Spencer calls self-improvement a “mixed bag” — genuinely useful in parts, low-value in others — and argues humans weren’t evolved for happiness but for survival, with happiness merely one motivational tool among many. He suggests that modern life (constant screens, short-form video) has pushed us further from our evolutionary environment, compounding psychological strain in ways that are hard to isolate from any single cause.
7. AI’s Impact on Self-Improvement, Coaching, and “Light Gassing” — 0:24–0:31
Michael connects this to his own research into technology’s side effects, and Spencer predicts AI will be a much bigger psychological shockwave than social media, as people increasingly turn to AI instead of friends for advice. He coins the term “light gassing” — the opposite of gaslighting — where AI validates a person’s one-sided, distorted view of a situation because it’s optimized to please users. He also expects AI to disrupt the coaching industry, and describes launching an AI bot to help readers apply the 12 levers, framing the goal as producing more high-quality work with AI rather than more low-quality output.
8. Preparing for the AI Wave: The Overconfident Intern — 0:31–0:36
Extending the marathon-training metaphor Michael raises, Spencer describes learning to use AI well as an ongoing process of experimentation: neither dismissing it nor blindly trusting it, but treating it like a brilliant, overconfident intern whose reliability you learn area by area. He shares an example of using Claude Code, where the AI produced badly designed but functional code that would have gone unnoticed without careful review, underscoring that human judgment on process — not just output — remains essential. He also shares his own trick of instructing AI to always present the strongest arguments for and against unsettled claims.
9. Psychedelics, Emerging Therapies, and the Need for Caution — 0:36–0:40
Michael raises newer therapies like psychedelics and somatic approaches. Spencer notes psychedelics fall outside his book’s psychological focus but discusses promising early evidence for MDMA and ketamine, cautioning that small, early studies tend to overestimate effect sizes and that risks are often underestimated in the excitement phase. He draws a parallel to how SSRI antidepressant side effects, like sexual dysfunction in 40–50% of users, were underappreciated early on.
10. The Body-Mind Connection: Breathing, Exercise, and Sleep Restriction — 0:40–0:45
Spencer explains how the body and mind are deeply intertwined, giving breathing as an example: slower, exhale-emphasized breathing calms, while faster, inhale-emphasized breathing energizes. On exercise, his top advice is simply finding a form you enjoy, or using “temptation bundling” to pair it with something pleasurable. On sleep, he introduces sleep restriction, a paradoxical but well-proven insomnia technique where you shorten time in bed to improve sleep efficiency before gradually extending it.
11. How to Use the Book: Root Causes and Intrinsic Values — 0:45–0:50
Spencer explains why the book begins with unraveling root causes and then moves to intrinsic values: the things people care about purely for their own sake, not as a means to something else. Drawing on research with thousands of survey submissions and existing philosophical and psychological literature, he and his co-author mapped these into 22 categories. Michael connects this to his own experience at NYU business school, where most students defaulted into finance careers without examining what they actually valued.
12. AI, Meaning, and Work in a Post-Job World — 0:50–0:55
The discussion turns to how people might find meaning if AI displaces much traditional work. Spencer argues some intrinsic values, like connection or creativity, could still be met or even enhanced in a world of material abundance, while values tied to changing the world through personal action could become harder to satisfy as AI takes on more of that role. He voices cautious optimism, conditional on society successfully solving collective-action problems like AI safety and resource redistribution.
13. Who Should Read The 12 Levers, and the Book’s Bonuses — 0:55–0:57
Asked for his pitch to a skeptical reader, Spencer says he wrote the book he wished he’d had, distilling the small fraction of self-help material that actually works for both people burned by empty self-help promises and avid readers who think they’ve already seen it all. He outlines the three reader bonuses available at 12leversbook.com: a full reading list of source material, an AI bot to help apply the techniques, and a tool for building the techniques into daily habits.
14. Worry Time: Taming Chronic Worry — 0:57–1:00
Spencer shares a favorite underused technique, “worry time,” in which people write down each new worry once per day instead of dwelling on it, then set aside a dedicated time later to worry as intensely as they want about everything on the list. This reveals people have more control over worry than they assume, that a scheduled worry session often burns out faster than expected, and that it opens space for turning worries into concrete next actions instead of endless rumination.
15. Feedback Loops: Why Psychological Struggles Get Stuck — 1:00–1:05
Building on the sleep and worry examples, Spencer generalizes that most psychological difficulty comes not from the triggering event itself but from an unresolved feedback loop, as with PTSD, where prolonged exposure therapy works by letting a looping reaction finally resolve. He also describes how coping strategies learned in childhood, like acting out to get attention, can persist into adulthood because they still produce short-term rewards even as they cause long-term relationship damage.
16. The Four Things You Actually Control — 1:05–1:11
Spencer distills a core insight from writing the book: people ultimately control only four things — their body, their thoughts (specifically, their response to an initial thought), their communication, and their attention. Recognizing how little is actually controllable, he argues, reduces the suffering that comes from fighting uncontrollable things, and he offers a simple lens for tackling any challenge across those four areas. He adds that once basic physical needs are met, nearly all remaining suffering originates from thoughts, a realization he finds genuinely striking.
17. Personal Experimentation and Spencer’s Self-Experiments — 1:11–1:17
Spencer describes his habit of always running one or two lightweight self-experiments, tracked with simple daily notepad entries rather than rigorous data collection. He explains why he abandoned an earlier, highly randomized approach to self-experimentation: with only an “n of 1,” small effects (around 5%) get lost in day-to-day noise, so he now only looks for effects large enough to notice within a few weeks. He shares two examples — sleep-specific in-ear headphones that stay in place and play low-stimulation audio, and an ongoing experiment combining every sleep-onset technique he knows into one method.
18. Closing Thoughts — 1:17–1:18
Michael closes by praising the book and noting how the final segment shows Spencer isn’t just theorizing but actively experimenting on himself, dubbing Spencer’s approach “thought hacking.” He directs listeners to 12leversbook.com for the book’s bonuses and clearerthinking.org for Spencer’s free tools and newsletter, and the two exchange thanks.
