Today's guest is Spencer Greenberg, host of the Clearer Thinking podcast and co-author of what might be the last self-help book you will ever need. In The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life,  he and his co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, analyze hundreds of advice books and distill the most evidence-based psychological hacks they contain into a dozen techniques, or "levers," for self-improvement.

Greenberg and Nick Gillespie discuss how approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) harness our ability for critical thinking, why learning how to understand and focus your mind and feelings are fundamental to real autonomy, and whether there is a politics to self-improvement.

0:00—Introduction

0:56—What are the 12 levers?

4:38—Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

8:28—Greenberg's experience with reflex responses

13:03—Confronting social anxiety

15:28—Genetic predispositions and chemistry

21:33—Understanding the causes of psychological challenges

26:10—Emotions and unified consciousness

30:55—What is cognitive restructuring?

36:25—Attention training

40:09—The inner "why" technique

45:21—Is stoicism on the rise?

48:14—Are there political implications to self-improvement?

50:49—How to detect frauds in the self-help genre

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