The Power of Asking Questions with Spencer Greenberg

Spencer Greenberg is a mathematician, entrepreneur, and the Founder of Clearer Thinking, a company that offers free online tools and training programs to help people change their habits and make better decisions.

Spencer is also the Founder and CEO of Spark Wave, a venture builder that creates socially beneficial software products from scratch. Spencer is the host of the podcast Clearer Thinking, where he explores ideas related to society, technology, science, and self-help.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Spencer Greenberg shares why questions are so important to him.
How Spencer began using questions for self-reflection and building relationships.
Spencer discusses how his company, Clearer Thinking, helps people create better habits.
How can you train your mind to generate positive thoughts?
Building mental causal models to become a better leader.
Tips for mapping out your schedules and routines.
Spencer shares how he uses Twitter—and how it has enhanced his thinking.
Questions as a form of content for thought leadership.
Building conversation through Spencer’s podcast, Clearer Thinking.
What creates long-term value for thought leadership?
The overlap between truth and value.
The art of storytelling and developing your voice.

In this episode…

Asking questions can be a resource to guide you through life’s decisions and avoid common pitfalls. But what questions should you be asking yourself? And how can you use questions to reach your goals?

Spencer Greenberg is an expert at asking questions to build relationships, find value in life, and self-reflect. Spencer has over 8 years of experience building free online resources and training programs to help others avoid bias, make better decisions, and improve their life.

In this episode of The Michael Simmons Show, host Michael Simmons is joined by Spencer Greenberg, Founder of Clearer Thinking and host of the podcast Clearer Thinking. Spencer shares the reasons why you should ask more questions and how you can use questions to build better habits. His strategies can help you form relationships, decipher the truth, solve problems, and achieve your goals. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by my company, Seminal.

We help you create blockbuster content that rises above the noise, changes the world, and builds your business.

To learn about creating blockbuster content, read my article: Blockbuster: The #1 Mental Model For Writers Who Want To Create High-Quality, Viral Content

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:02

Welcome to The Michael Simmons Show where we help you create blockbuster content that changes the world and builds your business. We dive deep into the habits and hacks of today’s top thought leaders. Now, here’s the show.

Michael Simmons 0:14

Today, we have one of my close friends joining us, Spencer Greenberg. Spencer is one of the smartest people I know. And also one of the most caring people I know, he got a undergrad degree in math from Columbia University, and then got a PhD in math from NYU, where I went to school. And he has, after that build a quantitative hedge fund company, and that was successful. And now is building apps, which are focused on increasing the quality of life for people from everything from depression, to just thinking routines to make better decisions. And another thing about Spencer is, I love that he’s just really elite learner. And he has a very unique approach to learning, which we’re going to talk about. And he’s one of the best question askers that I’ve seen, do you look on his Twitter, you’ll see that he’s constantly asking questions and predicting the responses. And so today, we’re gonna really talk about one of the fundamental things of thought leadership, which is asking really high quality questions, and so much of being a thought leader stems from asking those questions. So without further ado, I give you Spencer Greenberg. All right, Spencer. Welcome to the podcast. Really, really excited to have you here,

Spencer Greenberg 1:39

Michael, so glad to be here.

Michael Simmons 1:42

So I feel like when we talk, there’s a million things we could talk about. That’s true. But today, I want to talk about a very specific thing that I think you have expertise in that more than anyone else I know. And it’s a really important area. And that area is question. You create applications through Spark Wave, to take people through sequences of questions, to help with depression to help be more creative to make wiser decisions to connect with others. You probably on my feed, you do more questions via Twitter polls than anyone. And now with a podcast, you’re actually asking questions. And so my first question for you is he tell me more of your story in history with questions. And that got you to see them so important.

Spencer Greenberg 2:32

Love it, it’s a question. Question. Yeah, so one way to think about questions is that you’re giving a prompt to your subconscious. Because you generally speaking, when you when you get an answer back from a question, it just kind of pops into your mind what the answer is. And so if you think about your like subconscious mind is sort of a database questions or the way you query that database, and it’s sort of like, if you’re, you know, go, if you’re learning to use Google, well, you have to learn how do you make the right search queries, right? And similarly, to use your mind? Well, you have to learn to make the right search query. So that’s kind of a reframe of questions or the theory of how to search your own mind for answers.

Michael Simmons 3:12

Yes, question on there, I’m gonna be jumping around deeper, but it made me think about this. I’ve been going pretty deep on parts work. There’s all these different disciplines like internal family systems, voice dialoguing, optimal conflict, there’s probably like, I lost about 10 things where you ask yourself different, you’re not just asking yourself a general question to your general subconscious, you are asking a specific part of yourself a question. Or sometimes Marc Andreessen has this idea of like, he has avatars of people, such as like Peter Thiel, on his shoulder, when he he’s solving a problem? He asked the question, how do you think about that when you’re doing question? Do you just do it to the general subconscious, or to a part of your mind that?

Spencer Greenberg 3:59

Great, that’s a that’s a good question. I don’t take those parts too, literally. I think they’re useful metaphors, or it put into the framework that we’ve been talking about search queries, their metadata on the search query, it’s like, you’re giving yourself a question in the style and give me the answer in the style of Peter Thiel, right? Or just say, or, you know, you’re asking yourself a question, but respond from the point of view of the child and myself that is scared and was hurt or whatever. So I think that that that’s it’s basically metadata that changes the way we respond. But I don’t think that those parts are literal, I think that they’re just ways of altering the way that we get a response.

Michael Simmons 4:36

Yeah, it’s interesting, though, because it could give us very different answers. It’s not just absolutely a different style. It’s fundamentally It could even be opposing answers.

Spencer Greenberg 4:44

Right, right. Well, essentially, what I think is going on there is you’re getting your mind to simulate something. So that your your mind is simulate Peter Thiel. So you have like a little mental model of Peter Thiel. It’s obviously much less complex than the actual Peter Thiel. And you’re like, Okay, brain, do a Peter Thiel simulation and then give me the answer. Question or, you know, simulate the part of myself that like, tends to get social anxiety and like, you know, get into that little simulation before you respond. So, you know, I mean, it’s, uh, you know, obviously, there’s a lot of mystery to you know what the brain is actually doing. But I don’t take it too literally that like, there’s actually this childlike part or this,

Michael Simmons 5:20

you know, inside of you. Yeah. How did you get into questions? When did when do you use your first memory of thinking about? Okay, questions are valuable, and I should collect them or ask better questions.

Spencer Greenberg 5:32

Well, one of my ways I got into it was I started thinking about the 32 questions to fall in love that, that set of questions that a researcher had developed with the idea that it creates bonding, and he had done a bunch of experiments, I think he actually even had had a case where people actually fell in love in his lab. And I started thinking about, well, what else can questions be used for? And one thing that became very interesting to me is, what are the best questions for self reflection? So I developed a little experimental protocol, where we would recruit people online, ask them a series of questions, so that we collected hundreds of possible like self reflection questions. And then we would have the person answer them just open ended, you know, write your answer. And then we would have them rate how valuable was experience for answering that question. And this allowed us to assign a score to every question of like, how valuable that people find it to answer. And that allowed us to kind of rank order. And then so we use that to create something we call the life changing questions, which you can do for free on our website, clearerthinking.org. And we also made a really beautiful physical deck of cards you can do with friends and stuff like that. But it’s Yeah, it’s called Life Changing Questions. And it’s, and it’s a whole bunch of questions that maximize the score of like producing value for the answer.

Michael Simmons 6:48

Really interesting. And when you did that, how many questions are there total on that?

Spencer Greenberg 6:53

It depends on the version, we have a lot of different versions. So we have one version that you do with a group, which is certain length that we have another version that you do yourself, and then we have a mini version if you don’t have time. And then we actually have a pen pal mode where you can answer and then it will send your answers to a friend that you choose. And if they answer, you can get their answers back. So Oh,

Michael Simmons 7:10

all different lengths, depending on how much time you have. So did you find that there’s an optimal? So for example, they have the 32 questions to fall in love. Maybe there’s an optimal number where they could have fallen in love with 20 questions or something like that? Did you find anything surprising just in the quantity of questions and how they stacked up in the moment? Or really, they could be separated, you just ask one at a time.

Spencer Greenberg 7:32

The way I think about it is imagine you ask your like most impactful question first, then your second was impactful next. And of course, it’s just an average it can differ per person. But let’s say you, you know, you do your best on average one’s best and average person and so on, you’re gonna get is this curve, where each additional question is a little bit less valuable than the one before because you’ve rank ordered them. Right? And then the the number of questions you ask is literally just a question of like, how far down the curve you want to go, there’s gonna be diminishing marginal turn all the way down, you’re gonna get a smooth curve. And it’s like, well, when did the point you want to cut it out? So I don’t think there really is a right number. It’s just like, when do you when you is the bang for the buck? Not worth it for you anymore?

Michael Simmons 8:08

This is a curiosity question. I guess all of them are. But uh, is there one? What’s the number one question that was ranked the highest if you remember, in a life changing questions?

Spencer Greenberg 8:18

Yeah, I don’t remember it also, like, there were a bunch of there were almost hide. So it’s like, I don’t know if we can really differentiate, but sorry about that. Sorry about that. Just my bell rang.

Michael Simmons 8:27

It’s okay,

Spencer Greenberg 8:28

okay. Okay. Anyways, there was, but I’ll tell you one of my favorites, though. So ranked really well is, what in life gets you truly excited? And the reason I love this question is, first of all, people find it really valuable to answer. But second of all, it’s a way of cutting through the bullshit conversations we so often have, when we are getting to know someone, it’s a little awkward ask and you can kind of figure out a reframing of a different way to ask in different scenarios to make it less awkward. But it basically is like what is important to you? What are you excited about? And as soon as you can figure out what’s exciting to the other person, it just makes conversations dramatically better. And there’s been a bunch of times where I’ve like used a variant on this question in a conversation with someone I just met. And suddenly, their eyes light up, and they start telling me about this thing they’re, like, deeply passionate about, and we’ve just skipped, like, 20 minutes of bullshit conversation. So

Michael Simmons 9:15

talking about the weather or the latest sports figures or something like that. Exactly. Yeah, I really like that. You know, actually, Emerson Spartz, our mutual friend got me to think this way, because he’s, he has this thing about being really against small talk, because he just, he’s really good at but adding all those hours, you know, when everything’s about one thing, he adds it up, you know, across 40 years, and then it’s like, Okay, this is the way I like, but I still feel like it’s helpful to build a relationship, you know, not just jump in. So I like that or the the bridging. Yeah, you know,

Spencer Greenberg 9:48

if you think about small talk, it’s not the small talk is useless, small talk does serve a purpose. For one thing is you’re learning to kind of trust that this person is like, not going to just, you know, do something really weird. So Like, it’s kind of gives you a comfort level with the person. And also, it’s just a familiarity thing. Like by spending time with them getting familiar with them, they tend to breed liking. It also avoids awkwardness, you know, small talk is a way. It’s like a standard way of like not having awkward conversations. But it’s also not optimized. So it’s like it does his goals, but it’s not the best way to do those goals.

Michael Simmons 10:22

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It’s

Spencer Greenberg 10:24

sort of the easiest way, it’s the easiest way to achieve those goals. So it’s like the lowest effort, lowest energy, you know, lowest difficulty level version of that.

Michael Simmons 10:31

And so going back to your, your, your story of you How long ago was that? I feel like you’ve been right, at least since I’ve known you, you know, through Clearer Thinking. And I feel like you’re always asked questions. How long ago? Was that for you?

Spencer Greenberg 10:45

Yeah, so I can remember we started working on like, cheating question. Maybe it was five years ago, I was certainly interesting question before that. But that was like, really took it to the next level where I was like, I want to systematically study questions. And I made a list of, you know, hundreds of questions for reflection, trying to really understand like, what are the questions trying to do? What are the best questions and so on? And so that took a turn for me?

Michael Simmons 11:05

What do you feel like you understand about questions, having collected hundreds and really thought about them, and also had the opportunity to test them with 1000s of people responding to them? And then reading the questions? What do you understand that others don’t?

Spencer Greenberg 11:18

Yeah, I think that one thing that people don’t necessarily recognize is that for almost any like, important life domain, there’s a set of questions that could potentially help you in it. And so you know, some of the categories I think about are self understanding, learning, figuring out the truth, self improvement, planning, friendship, group bonding, these are all areas where there are questions that will help in that domain. And so the idea of questions, this is the super powerful thing that can be applied almost anywhere, and then it’s about optimizing the right questions for the right goal.

Michael Simmons 11:51

And then, when it comes to actually applying it those like you’ve already done the work about getting the domain, the questions that are most powerful for that domain. Now, do you have them all memorized? And do you kind of naturally use them in the right timing? Or it’s almost basically like creating a new habit? How did you make that into a habit?

Spencer Greenberg 12:09

Well, for some of these sets of questions, what we do is we launch programs on clearerthinking.org trying to ask you the appropriate questions to help you in that domain. For, for example, for big life decisions, we create a tool called the decision advisor, you try, it’s free. And that tool essentially asks you a large number of questions about your decision to help guide you through it and help you avoid common pitfalls. So that’s like a way we can systematize it and make it really easy for people to use the right questions for the right task. But then there’s still a lot of we haven’t implemented yet. There’s still a lot of demands, and we haven’t built a program and they’re there. It’s just, uh, you know, I’m just trying to collect them and keep them in mind.

Michael Simmons 12:47

But how is it for you in your own process? example? Are you using Clearer Thinking all the time? Okay, I picture at some point, they become automatic. And like, you know, when you’re in a group, you’re like, Okay, this question, and you don’t even think about it.

Spencer Greenberg 13:01

Right. So basically, you want to install some form of trigger in your mind, if you can, with the sort of trigger responses, like, I’m in situation x, oh, I can use question Y or Z here like that. That’d be good. You know, and so what like, just to give an example of that, when it comes to questions to help you figure out the truth. Let’s say you’re trying to figure out what’s true about something and you’re leaning towards a certain answer, you know, you’re like, well, I, you know, I think that COVID is has has, you know, a certain level of effect a certain infection fatality rate, right? Like, you have a belief about that. You’re trying to figure out the truth. There’s a set of questions you can use there, and you want the fact that you’re like, on this search for the truth to trigger the right set of questions at the right moment. And so they’re one of the questions might be, well, what evidence can I find against my belief? That’s an excellent question, in a truth gathering mode to have triggered that moment, if you don’t think to ask the question, that moment is not gonna help you.

Michael Simmons 13:52

How do you do that? I feel like sometimes it’s a trigger, like waking up in the morning, or, you know, you can set an alarm for it. But then that’s when it’s an emotion it takes a while to do it. Is there a way that you think about triggering it when you feel an emotion or? Okay, am I normally not going through life to think about Okay, I’m trying to find truth here. Although Yeah.

Spencer Greenberg 14:15

But you’re trying to find truth you just made that you just like have not had that like trigger installed of like, I am in truth searching mode, therefore, I should do these things. Okay. So we’ve done two different projects trying to get at this where I think is is very important question, how do you trigger people to have the right thought at the right time? One of them is on Clear, again, the clearerthinking.org website, we have a project called happiness habits. And what we do is we try to get you to associate an object in your environment with mental maneuver. And so in that case, we do gratitude, we do mindfulness, etc. And we basically put you through a training program to try to get you associate an object. So for example, if you say, you say to us, oh, yeah, I will see a mirror like about 15 times a day, right? Perfect, we’re gonna try to get it so that every time you see him here, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have a grateful thought. And so these, these are kind of non directed, yes, they are non directed triggers, they’re like, you’re just trying to increase the rate of a certain type of thought. But it’s not that important when you do it. And we actually ran a study where we had people, we had a control group, and we had an intervention group where they were enrolled in this program, and we tracked their happiness for three days, people were actually significantly happier. During that three day period, when they were enrolled in this, we’re triggering these like thoughts of gratefulness and mindfulness, etc. So that’s like the generic version, then if we get into the more specific version, we’re working on a project, it’s still very early stage, but it’s called Thought Saver. And Thought Saver, one of the goals of it is to allow you to instal these triggers. And so we’re basically trying to develop technology to make this a lot easier to instal the right have the right thought at the right moment based on race. Yeah.

Michael Simmons 15:49

Is there a, what are the objects for you? Or what are the things for you that for now might be automatic? But are there ones that have systems that have worked personally Well, for you?

Spencer Greenberg 16:00

Yes, the one that’s worked well, for me is just trying to memorize the cognitive biases at like a deep level. So for example, understanding, not just like what the bias is, so that I could explain it. But like having generated a bunch of examples of each bias, trying to think about when I might fall for the bias, and that when you’re kind of attacking the understanding of multiple levels simultaneously, like, Where am I going to see that? And this is where questions come in. It’s like, Where am I most likely see is bias in my own life? Like, that’s a great question to ask or were in the past, would it could I could I have used my knowledge with this bias, and you’re trying to tie it into your like neural network in such a way that then then that when you see that pattern in real life, like the thought comes to mind, like, Oh, wait, this might be this bias? And then there’s questions you can ask yourself at that point. So let’s take, for example, the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy is a very common issue that occurs where people underestimate how long a project will take, or how many, how many resources it will cost, etc. There’s various reasons for why this occurs, but it’s super common. So what you want to do there is you want to install the pattern of the planning fallacy, like connecting it in with all these questions like, when am I likely to see this when we’re this occurred during the past, etc, etc. And then when you’re going about your real life, and you’re about to make an estimate for how long a project will take, or how much a project will cost, suddenly, you want to get into like to that that trigger occurs without you even, you know, having having to do anything about it, just like oh, planning fallacy, and now you have your follow up questions. Okay. This seems like it might be the planning fallacy. Do you have follow up questions like, okay, am I sure that I’ve accounted for all of the different things that need to be done, have I, you know, put in a buffer for like, unknown unknowns, etc, etc.

Michael Simmons 17:39

I really like that. So the way I’m associating in my head is, is a stimulus but and there’s network that a stimulus could be in charge external. So it’s just a physical object. But it could be internal, that you’ve just planted this in your head such that when it happens, your mind just associates the two. And then I think about it as a network is that you’re trying to network in these things into your life. It could be physically or and not just one Association, but multiple associations. So if you ask the question, Where, where have I seen this in my life? Or where might I see this, those sorts of things, start to wire it to almost look for it, like, the reticular Activation System, almost of most of this reality we’re ignoring, but you start to look for it in your head.

Spencer Greenberg 18:28

Yeah, really common misconception is that you don’t really need to know, things that can be memorised, because you could just look them up. And if you think about that, that idea that like, Oh, well, I could just look this thing up. What you don’t realise is that you will not even think to look it up in most cases. So you know, stuff like, you know, easy examples, like the Pythagorean Theorem, because yes, you could always look up the Pythagorean Theorem, but if you haven’t encoded in your mind, the pattern of when the Pythagorean Theorem is needed, like, Oh, I know, two sides of a triangle, I’m trying to, you know, calculate something else about the triangle. If you haven’t encoded that pattern, you will never think to look up the Pythagorean theorem. And therefore, even though you could, in theory, look it up. It’s not gonna help you. So it’s actually not the formula you need. It’s the pattern union.

Michael Simmons 19:13

Hmm. And the pattern is where it works when it’s relevant. Exactly.

Spencer Greenberg 19:19

Yeah, exactly. Interesting. The Pythagorean Theorem is, you know, it’s an example where it’s clear cut, but it’s not something that most people would ever actually needed in real life. But you know, you think about so many self help techniques, they have exactly the same property where it’s like, you need to know the pattern when the technique is useful. And then maybe you can look it up at that moment, you know, if you’re not in a rush or anything like that, but if you miss the pattern, you’re never going to think to use it.

Michael Simmons 19:44

How, you know, let’s just take a typical day for you, you know, you’re working, you’re having meetings, you’re reading a book, let’s say or doing something going online, and how is reflection built into that? So let’s just assume you have all the questions now. What does that look for you? How many questions? Are you deliberately asking yourself? And then how much time are you spending in one?

Spencer Greenberg 20:06

Right? So a lot of it is driven by triggers. So I’ll be working with my teams. And one of the questions I try to help them with every week is like, Okay, were there any problems that came up in your work? Do you have any blockers, and then those often generate, like, as soon as you know, a lot of times, it’s just oh, there’s no big deal. Nothing happened, really, of note. But sometimes it’s like, Oh, I got stuck on this thing. Okay. And that’s when, okay, now, a new set of questions come out of like, how do you get someone unblocked? How do you get to the root cause? Something that I have been thinking about more and more lately, is that to solve problems, you have to build a little mental causal model of the problem. And so questions come into play very deeply, because the questions enable you to build a little causal model. So let me just give you an example. Let’s say an employee says, Oh, yeah, you know, sorry, I like I didn’t get that stuff done. I know, I said, we get it done. Right. Okay. Well, that’s it, that is a potential problem, maybe it’s no big deal. Maybe it’s a fluke. But let’s say this happened a few times now. Now, there’s a lot of different possibilities of like, what’s really going on. And, you know, I think a kind of, you know, mid skill level boss will just kind of put pressure on the employee not to do it again. And that might work. But the problem is, if that person doesn’t know how to make it not happen again, it will totally fail, it was a stress the person out and fail and make their job, you know, make them less happy. So I think a more skilled boss will actually start asking questions, to try to build a little mental causal model of like, why Okay, why is this person not getting their work done? What’s going on? I have different hypotheses. And my questions are gonna help me sort between them, I build this little model. And once I have the model, now I have a prediction about what the right intervention is.

Michael Simmons 21:42

Yeah, really interesting. That’s almost like a if then our branching thing where you ask the initial questions for diagnosis. And then once you have that, it could, depending on the path, it could lead to different questions. Exactly. I’ve really gotten deep on Ray Dalio knows that his approach to problems, have you have you done that before?

Spencer Greenberg 22:06

You know, I am not such a principles based person. I’ve been thinking about this recently. Like, what is a principle really, like, I’ve been pondering this and I have come to thinking on this, is it a principle is sort of a pre computed answer to a question. So it’s like, it’s like, let’s say you have a principle of like, always tell the truth, which is something that I aspire to do. Well, that principle is really a precomputed answer to anytime you have a question of like, should I tell the truth? It’s like, my principal says, yes. So I’m just gonna do it. I don’t have to recompute an answer for each scenario, right. And so the interesting thing to me about principals is that like, so what problem are they really trying to solve? But one, they can reduce cognitive burden? Because instead of having to try to answer the question, each time it comes up, you already have a pre computed answer to they can sometimes overcome weakness of will. Because like, maybe you in this particular case, you have, like, you know, you really want to not tell the truth, because like, it’s less stressful for your something. But like, if you could just learn to follow your principles, like a habit, you can actually be like, Oh, well, that’s my principle. That’s the thing I live by. So I’m just gonna do it anyway. And the third thing is that principles can help solve coordination mechanisms. Because even if a bunch of people don’t necessarily agree with each other on every point, they might be agree on principles. And then if they agree on the principles, they reach a consensus on the principles, then when they’re making decisions, they can all use the same decision making like elements.

Michael Simmons 23:27

Hmm, I’m gonna put a marker in there cuz I want to go deeper. But if I share her on that, then we’re gonna go away from the the, but I was going at the for. So for Ray Dalio, he, you know, he has this idea of problems of just, this is kind of outside of his principles work, but Okay, okay. Yeah, logs, prot, he logs problems. So when employees feel an emotion during the day, typically, let’s say really angry or something like that, there’s both that’s a trigger for them to log. Okay, who are they around? What are they working on? Or if a problem happens? You log it, and then you reflect on it. Okay, what were the root causes of it? What were the symptoms of it? What’s the severity of it? And then once you have the root cause, then you go towards, okay, what can we do to solve it? But it sounds very similar to what you’re what you’re talking about there as well.

Spencer Greenberg 24:21

Yeah, totally. So if you think about patterns, triggering questions, like one of the best triggers for questions is there’s a problem. Right?

Michael Simmons 24:29

Right, right. Yep. So there’s a problem is what is one trigger? Okay, so that’s one that you look at in your, your daily going through your day, when you’re talking to employees, asking about if there’s any problems and then helping to build a causal model, and then do the experimentation to solve it. What are other areas where you apply in your day to day life?

Spencer Greenberg 24:50

So another good one is planning. So you’re about to begin, you know, making a plan to you know, trying to achieve some goal and that’s a great time for Questions. And so, you know, simple questions like what could go wrong with this plan? Another question that sort of can work even better, is you do the pre mortem technique where you say, okay, actually assuming that this plan fails, why, right? Like, like, let me ensure you’re going back to the search engine analogy, you’re giving a query to your brain, like this thing failed, now generate the reason, right. And it will usually come up with some reasons of why it failed. I also use this when I’m recruiting CEOs, like I’ll ask people that know the CEO, well, the potential CEO well, like, imagine that this person started a company and it failed, but not for the reasons that companies usually fail. Instead, it fails for a reason that relates to this person, what do you think the reason is?

Michael Simmons 25:42

Yeah, it is kind of amazing. I actually really loved the pre mortem as well, question. But it is amazing that you can actually predict your own failure, you know, it’s that guy. But even like I ask is this, I love asking this when people are setting habits of Okay, you said you’re going to, you know, read this amount per week or write this amount per week? how likely are you to actually do that? And you can ask, that said, if it’s like 50%, then you could be like, Okay, what would it take to get higher, but I always found it interesting that we can already you would think that if we knew something wasn’t going to work, then we would do something about it. But it’s almost like we have to ask ourselves a question and to fully hit that subconscious, the

Spencer Greenberg 26:26

I think, yeah, man, I think it’s important to understand that there’s many ways to know something. And so like, you can know it in some like, deep, intuitive way, but had not have raised it to your system to like, you know, conscious awareness. And so these questions can like pull it up from the low level of the hive, like you’re saying, and then now that it’s in your, like, conscious working memory, now you can interact with it and explore it and make a plan and so on. Hmm.

Michael Simmons 26:51

And do you do when you think about planning, even talking about like the daily planning, do you apply this with just okay, here’s what my, my day is gonna look like. And then you ask yourself the pre mortem question.

Spencer Greenberg 27:02

So I’m more of a person who likes to design my schedule, to rather than, like, each day, make a plan. That makes sense. So I have my schedule has like a certain, you know, fixed element to it every week. And then that’s kind of like, yeah, so I guess you could say it’s almost like pre pre planned rather than having to make a daily plan.

Michael Simmons 27:21

Right. Right. That makes sense anymore. On the weekly basis, you might be asking the plan. Exactly. Exactly. And do you have a routine where you do what to do the week planning at a certain time or day? Or is it just happened over the weekend? At some point?

Spencer Greenberg 27:35

Well, no, it’s for me, it’s like, it’s largely like preset for months. Like basically, I kind of have my, my, you know, work schedule already mapped out and it’s like the same each week. So just to give you a little clearer on that. So for example, Monday mornings are I always leave open for like, working on, on anything that needs to prepare me for the week. So that’s just like open block of free work time. And then I’ll have certain times when I do cold phone calls with my teams. And then I’ll have other blocks where that are where I leave open. So I have more time to work on, like longer term strategy and things like that.

Michael Simmons 28:12

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you’re not planning exactly what you’re going to do in the blocks, but you will plan out the block. Okay, so So far, we’ve talked about problem and planning. And then, are there other areas, let’s say, let’s just focus on the unit of a day where you’re like, Okay, like for you, is it ever like, okay, here’s my half hour chunk at the end of the day, where I’m going to reflect or I’m going to talk with my partner, and we go through these questions every day. Is, is that regimented? Or is it more seamless in the day? Where it’s just like a quick question at one point in the day,

Spencer Greenberg 28:47

I think that the worst situations where you don’t ask questions, the next level, is where you like, have explicit time. Like, I’m gonna ask these questions these times. And then the ultimate version of this is like, the pattern in the world triggers the question in your mind at the right moment, when it’s ideal. And then there’s still be some like set aside planning time maybe like maybe an annual review or something like that. But like the, to me, the thing to aspire to is like to actually get it to the point where the world triggers the right question for that action. However, I think just building in time for question is like a great way to get up to that I

Michael Simmons 29:24

really like that it’s similar with mental models are in most things learning, you have to be deliberate first set aside time. And then the goal is you use it automatically. And one thing you’ve done that I find really interesting is just, you’re just you’ve really started being active this year on Twitter, and then just doing, you know, typical posts of content posts. And then you switch toward asking a ton of questions, then, like a really high volume of questions. And then also you have your prediction of the responses. How do you tell me more of the story behind that and how it’s been going? Well, you’ve learned Yeah,

Spencer Greenberg 30:00

I’ve been really enjoying it. Yeah, like, so yeah, I basically, just in terms of questions, every morning, I asked myself, what’s the topic I think is valuable. And then once I pick the topic, then I either will try to tweet about the most valuable thing I can think of about that topic, or I’ll tweet a question about it. And so so I tricked you. And if I don’t think of something in the morning, then I’ll try and think of it, you know, some point throughout the day, but that, to me, has been like really valuable. Like, I think it’s weird for people to say like Twitter made them smarter, but actually, like Twitter has actually enhanced my thinking, because it forces me to do this, like exercise that is so valuable, which is, what is the most important thing I can say about this topic. And it forces you to like extract, extract, like your knowledge of it and squeeze it down into 280 characters. So I, I found that really valuable. And also, it’s increased the volume of ideas, because it’s like now I’m, you know, now I’m actually generating even more ideas than was before. So I like that a lot. In terms of polls, basically, once I got a large enough Twitter following, I could start getting a you know, reasonable sample size of my polls. And so then, it became a way of just saying, I’m curious about this thing about humans. What, what do you what do people say about this? And I also, I’ve already asked my Twitter followers about their demographics, like their age and gender and where they live and stuff like that. So I already have a sense of like, Who am I asking, right? Because that’s important, you know, not different people are gonna give you different answers. But I already know a command says, I know who I’m asking. And so now, anytime I’m curious about human nature, in any domain, I can just throw it out as a Twitter question a few minutes. But then what I realized is that to get the most out of that, I should actually have an anticipation. So then I started actually building, almost all of my Twitter polls actually make my prediction, which I obscure, so it’s not so easy to

Michael Simmons 31:45

Yeah, I like it. I do these characters where you have to really squint and read upside down to be able to actually see it.

Spencer Greenberg 31:52

Exactly. And so the point of that is to try to improve my learning on this even more, which is like, my brain thought the answer was this. Now I read the poll answers. And I see it’s different. And now I can do that update between what I used to think it was true and what’s actually true, which I think makes it much better for learning than merely reading the answer. Because when you merely read the answer a lot of time your brain is like, Oh, that makes sense, you know, even if it’s actually not what you would have predicted?

Michael Simmons 32:16

Hmm. And are there Have there been areas where you’ve been really surprised where that come top of your mind that you’ve learned from polls that like I actually, this is very different. Let me look into this. My belief Yeah.

Spencer Greenberg 32:29

So one of them that really surprised me is, unfortunately, Twitter only has four answer options you can get for a poll, just as frustrating. But one of them I asked about which of the four negative feelings they feel the most often. And I was quite surprised that people said sad was the was number one, one, I would not have thought that. So that’s something I want to investigate more, because I guess I didn’t think of sadness as being like, such a hugely prevalent emotion. I guess partly probably, you know, we all have this bias towards thinking that other people are more like we are. And so it’s pretty, it’s probably because I don’t feel that often I was sort of surprised by that. Yeah.

Michael Simmons 33:06

Really interesting. So I guess what, I guess what, as I’m listening to you, it’s like, one thing is, you’re seeing, we always assume everyone’s like us. So you’re just seeing where you’re unique, which is that’s valuable on multiple levels and ways and helps you communicate to people better and also just realize your own unique strengths or weaknesses. And then it also is really interesting, because it gives you a hunch, or something a thread you can pull on for research yourself as someone who loves to learn and floor things against you new avenues for exploration. whenever you can.

Spencer Greenberg 33:40

Yeah, whenever you’re surprised it’s a it shows is an opportunity to learn. That’s like essentially the emotion of surprises, like your prediction of reality to not meet reality. So you could have just been like unlucky could have just been a weird fluke clicks. And as it happens, but more often it’s actually shows that there’s something wrong with your model of the world. And so so one thing by doing these tweets and making prediction, if I’m surprised that means they’re trying to learn there now maybe I learned it just directly reading the poll, or maybe I have to go research the thing or maybe I have to go do a more robust study, but it shows as a learning opportunity.

Michael Simmons 34:09

What have you learned about asking questions as a result of you have, you know, hundreds of people answer each poll, has it improved your question asking and if so how?

Spencer Greenberg 34:18

It has because was I’ve seen like sort of every misinterpretation. So it made me so one thing to note is that if someone is trying to get a certain answer from a poll, they, there’s a pretty good chance that if they’re savvy, they’ll be able to get that answer they want, because there are many ways to word things, and they’re wordings that will make something look good or bad. So for example, let’s say you want to make it seem like people are against gun control, you could be like, do you think that that the people’s constitutional rights or gun ownership should be removed? And people are going to be more aversive to that? Because like, people believe in the Constitution, right? Whereas if you say, should people be able to buy any gun they want anytime they want, then people are going to be more opposed to that, because like, even people who are fan of guns honestly think that just like it should be no holds barred. Anything goes, You know, I mean? So someone who’s like trying to get a certain answer can manipulate wording. But if you’re trying to figure out the truth, which hopefully you’re trying to do, then you have to think very carefully about which wording actually gets me the truest answer to my actual question. And so that’s just something I didn’t I don’t have like broad takeaways other than to say it takes a lot of practice to get your wording to actually match what you’re intending to convey and actually get the answer to the question you thought you’re asking, rather than just a question that other people thought you asked?

Michael Simmons 35:36

Do you keep a list of questions? And then once you have a question, do you spend, let’s say, 10 minutes refining the question, or I know I one post I liked from James Clear, he was saying for how to succeed on Twitter, and one of them was, after you’re finished the post, spend an extra 10 minutes trying to refine it. And just and during that time, you could do things like making it less leading. How’s that for you? Your process with questions?

Spencer Greenberg 35:59

Yeah, exactly. I usually make a quick first draft. And then it’s, it’s well, fitting into the tweet is also really challenging. For complex questions, or philosophical questions. But then, yeah, going back to reading it carefully, trying to think is this actually clear? How can I make it clear? You know, so, you know, this is this idea that I think you and I both believe in, which is that, if you can make the best version of the thing in the world, it’s just dramatically more likely to succeed than if you make kind of like the second best or fifth best. Yeah, and like, and it’s worth investing the time doing it well. And, you know, I think that’s a really powerful Good idea. But there’s also a micro version of that idea, which is that like, if you spend an extra 10 minutes refining your tweet, and you can actually make it like the best tweet anyone seen on that particular topic, then it’s much more likely to do well than if it’s just like, the third best sermon seen on the topic. So it doesn’t it. So it’s sort of like a lower version of the bar, because oh, it’s just a tweet, you’re not gonna spend three hours on it. But you can still try to make it the best tweet your audience has ever seen about that thing?

Michael Simmons 37:00

Yeah. I like that. Yeah. For blockbuster. I’ve also updated my philosophies before, I used to feel like it has to be comprehensive. But I think something that blockbuster could be a quote, that really just is the most simple capturing of that idea that really resonates and spreads. So I like that. And it’s interesting of just looking, you know, thinking about thought leadership, and we all have this platform where hundreds of millions of people, even billions are actually fairly regularly creating content that questions are, I think, I’ve noticed across Facebook and Twitter, that they get a lot of engagement. So which makes sense, because when people answer it, then that creates a comment, which is a signal, there’s engagement. How do you think about questions as a form of content for thought leadership and the role that could play?

Spencer Greenberg 37:53

Yeah, so another thing to think about when I’m writing questions, you know, especially you know, if I’m putting on a tweet is like, what is gonna be valuable to the person responding? Because there’s really two motivations for them to answer the question, and one is the value they get from the process of reflection. The second is the interest in seeing the answers of others, right? Because they don’t see it until they answer it. So those are the two draws to work with and you want to deliver, ideally, both but at least one of the two Otherwise, why would people answer it?

Michael Simmons 38:21

Right, I could see a third one of just some form of self expression. Like you just

Spencer Greenberg 38:26

that’s up there anonymous. So yeah, it’s still maybe you still maybe people will get value out of that? Yeah.

Michael Simmons 38:33

Yeah, it’s really interesting of just I could see somebody in the future, just that’s all they do is just they’re really good at asking questions. And, you know, you want to follow that person, because following them has all the benefits that you talked about that helps you plan things and makes you smarter. You want to share the questions with friends, and because you see that somebody’s just being that’s their thing.

Spencer Greenberg 38:54

Well, Ayla, if you’ve heard of Ayla, yeah, he is the master of asking questions on Twitter. And I believe she’s asked 1500 questions at this point. She has a spreadsheet of every one she’s ever asked.

Michael Simmons 39:05

Wow, that’s really cool. Yeah, I’ve seen in the posts that you’ve also talked about her as an inspiration for asking questions on Twitter and making that part of your

Spencer Greenberg 39:13

Yeah, she definitely inspired me on the Twitter front for in terms of the value of asking questions.

Michael Simmons 39:19

And then now you’re becoming a professional. question asker in another way, where you have your own podcast? What’s it been like for you asking? Asking questions via podcast? And have you learned anything deeper about questions that way?

Spencer Greenberg 39:35

Yes, that’s really interesting. Because in my podcast, I try to not make it an interview, I try to make it like a, the, the My favorite kind of conversation. So it’s like a fun conversation you have with a friend about an important idea where you’re like building on each other. And should that’s, that’s what I try to do. But still asking questions is, of course essential to that, right, because like, you have to get the conversation started. You have to like pull out of this person. And there are times I’m frustrated myself, because I know this person has a really interesting say about this. And somehow, I didn’t fully get the full value like of what they had to say, because I didn’t, I didn’t ask it in the right way. And I think one of the interesting things is that people don’t remember everything they’ve ever like, written on a topic. So it’s like, if you have someone you’re like, Oh, I know. They wrote this great blog post in Memphis, and you just throw a question at them. They actually might like, something nearly as interesting as the thing. He said. He was like, wait. Yeah, yeah. So. So terms of asking good questions, I think a big part of it is trying to make it as easy as possible for the respondent to say something that’s valuable to your audience. And I think one way to do so my preferred way to do that with my podcast is to actually ask my guests, what are the four or five most important things that you want to talk about? Do Wait, so basically, what are the ideas that matter to you? And so by basically, they should, they should be like super enthusiastic and ready to go, because like, they’ve told me this is like one of the most important things for them to talk about.

Michael Simmons 40:59

That’s a really I remember that when I was on your podcast is that and those really helped me because I, there’s certain ideas, I’m just kind of think about it as a bell curve of excitement for ideas, that beginning part of the curve, you know, you’re just like, not really excited, but then you get excited and something triggers you and explore it more. And sometimes, you become less excited as you go along. But other times, you get really more excited. But then as you learn more about it, then you kind of reach it starts declining, where you’re like, Okay, I’ve mastered this, I’ve integrated into my life, and I’m on to the next thing. So finding people where they’re at the peak of something is an interesting art. And I feel like your questions help. Do that. Right there. Like peak excitement.

Spencer Greenberg 41:39

Yeah. So yeah, so I guess I didn’t make this clear. When a guest is going to come on, I have this huge list of questions for them. And it’s the man it’s a mental list of questions. Because basically, it’s a list of questions about what you know, what are the things that you, you think, are most important to discuss? And so I try to help them get it in many different ways. You know, for example, asking, like, What’s something you believe that others don’t? So that’s like a classic, you know, classic question, but also questions like, you know, what’s the idea you use your life that other people don’t use? What’s something that you’ve changed your mind about, that you think is important? You know, so there’s like, many, many different ways to help them stimulate, like, what’s the most important thing for them to talk about?

Michael Simmons 42:17

Yeah. Okay, so another area I was excited to talk with you about with the questions was, there’s this certain type, everyone says, Okay, what are the best practices with questions, you want to ask open ended questions? And, you know, what do you believe that others don’t. But I what I’ve noticed, I don’t know the name of it, but there’s almost like visualization questions that are out there. So and I sometimes I see patterns in them. So one of them is kind of like a Dickens style pattern. of, I’ve seen this in transformational work, if you Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol, where there’s the ghost of Christmas, past, present, and future. So you have people visualize, okay, if you keep on following the same patterns you have right now that are limiting you, where does that take you in five years? 10 years, okay. And then 10 years, you’re this age, what is what’s happening in your life because of that, and then you then you talk about your with all these, you know, if you get that confidence, and you start doing those things in your business, or writing, publishing, every day, for years, work at that lead, and then it sets a frame where you answer very differently. And I’ve also heard another example that a friend told me wasn’t more of an elevator one, where for thought leaders where you have your current self, and you take it, you’re in a building, you take an elevator down, and you meet, the door opens. And there’s the cell from you, if five years ago, before you had this big insight that made you who you are today, but you don’t the doors gonna close in a second? Do you only have something you can only tell them something within 30 seconds or something? There’s a long elevator, I guess the doors open for a while. What would you say? And so something about the visualization part of it, pulls new things out. And I was curious if you’ve explored that at all. Yeah,

Spencer Greenberg 44:06

I think that’s a really good point. So first of all, going back to the sort of search engine analogy, like a question is like, give me a query to your subconscious. The nature of the subconscious is not inherently verbal. Like your subconscious represents concepts in sort of like in some pure form, it’s not in words. And so the output of the subconscious could be words, but it could just be a visualization. Or it could be a scent even like smell, right? You could ask your mind like, what is orange smell like? And then it will like, try to answer it with a scent. So it is really motor multimodal. And I think that that’s really what’s going on is like, partly, it’s that you can query it visually, like, what is my life, like, let me imagine my life, if I keep the certain patterns that’s like a visual query. So that’s a, that’s a really powerful concept. But there’s another thing that’s going on there, which is that you can use visualizations to make something more visceral. So, for example, the classic trolley problem, you know, from philosophy, right, very often repeated, it’s like, oh, you know, you The train is going down the track, and it’s gonna run over three people on the track, but you can flip the switch, so it runs and runs over one person, should you do it, and people will give a kind of answer. But if you imagine you are actually standing there, and you actually see the train coming, and you have 30 seconds to make a decision, and you see three people that are about to get hit. And then you look to see if you can divert the track and there’s one person and you like, look at them in the eye and like on the switch means you’re literally killing this person. Like that’s actually very, very different. And the abstract, your verbal description, and answering, it doesn’t really take us to there, and isn’t necessarily an accurate reflection of what you would actually do. But by trying to vividly imagine it, you can probably get closer to what you would actually do, maybe not all the way there but closer. And so I think that’s the second element of visualization is it can actually make things more realistic based on like our true behavior.

Michael Simmons 46:03

Um, I could also see it being you know, if the goal partly is to trigger certain things in your day or emotions, to a question, I could see it being helpful there as if you’re imagining, like, let’s say, walking through your day, the next planning meeting, and you know, your partner says something, and then you ask this question, that could probably wire it deeper.

Spencer Greenberg 46:22

Absolutely. And one visualization trick I do with planning is like, let’s have a big project. I tried to actually visualize all the different steps. Like, okay, I this has to happen, this has to happen this, and what that what I find really powerful about that is, it’s a great way to realize that there were missing steps, because then you’re like, starting to imagine some duties. And you’re like, wait, that doesn’t make any sense, because I didn’t do that thing. So I wouldn’t have that thing at that point. And like, you know, just as a simple example, imagine, like, you have a bunch of errands you have to run today. And they’re kind of complicated, and you have to get this thing and bring it there. It’s like, if you actually imagine doing each of the steps, you’ll realise that like, Oh, actually, I should do that before this and not the other way around. Whereas you might not just thinking about it intellectually, you might not realize that,

Michael Simmons 47:04

right? Thinking about intellectually sometimes even gives the feeling like you understand it. So that could be reasoning, we don’t actually probe it deeper, but I really liked that I just kind of man, it makes me really excited. And then also feel overwhelmed. I feel like there’s so many opportunities to ask better questions at the right time. At one point, I bought like seven journals with the intention of, Okay, I’m going to put one next to my bed. And that’s going to be when I wake up, and then give me for one thing and other other ones is surprise journal. I think I just shoot off way too much upfront on it, you know, but I could see, if somebody were just getting started asking better questions, and logging it in their own life for their let’s say, to learn better? What would you recommend?

Spencer Greenberg 47:55

Yeah, so for learning in particular, questions are very valuable. So they’re, I would, I would say, the kind of ideal trigger is like, you’ve just learned something new, like, let’s say you spent, you know, an hour reading something, or, you know, just learn learn about a new idea. So, one question that I think is really valuable is like, try to explain this, what would I say to explain this to someone? And like, some people like to use the query of like, a smart, 12 year old? How would you explain it to a smart 12 year old? because it forces you to, like, get rid of all the bullshit words and like, you know, complicated ways of saying things and just say, focus on like, what is the actual idea? Or, you know, use my method, which is like, I call it tweeting the core where you say, what’s the word is like, the most valuable part of this, you could explain 280 characters. And then also, we talked about or mentioned this a little bit, but like, how do you tie it in to your behavior? It’s like, so you can ask the question, what could you use? When could you have used this idea in your past? Like, if you had known this the past, when would you have used it? And then similarly, you can say, well, in my future, when can I imagine using this concept, and because the purpose there is to try to tie it in, show that you begin to actually think of it at the right moment when you need it. So I think those are all ways to make the learning actually stick a lot better. And it’s kind of incredible the amount of learning we waste because we don’t take like five minutes to integrate it. So we like read a whole book and then like five months later, we can’t remember anything about it because we never integrate the information in or like into our neural structures. One other last question I mentioned for learning is, what are their idea? is this related to that I already know. Oh, right, right. Yeah.

Michael Simmons 49:27

Really interesting. Actually, this is also inspired by Emerson. And then I made it my own as well. But I’ve called it the HA hack, though. Number one, whenever you’re reading something you the H stands for highlight, you get to that highlight point where something is interesting enough that you would just highlight it, you might not even know why. That’s a good point to pause. And then ask yourself, how would I apply this in different areas of my life? So it’s very similar to contextually applying it? But I actually really like adding an E for explain, try to explain it to someone else, huh?

Spencer Greenberg 50:07

Yeah, totally. It was when you when you try to explain it, it’s kind of like that, we were talking about where you like visualize a plan to find the gaps. As soon as you try to explain something, you realise what you don’t know about it most of the time, because you’re trying to explain it and you just hit a gap. You’re like, Oh, wait, how does that thing connect to that other thing? Yeah. Yeah, this

Michael Simmons 51:23

is really interesting. They both what they shared in common is that questions can help you find gaps in your, your thinking,

Spencer Greenberg 50:31

exactly one of the most valuable things that I found to do with entrepreneurs, because like, how often have entrepreneurs reach out and say, I can tell you about my idea and get your feedback? Is, I get them to tell me, I basically asked for Who is this product going to solve what problem at one moment in their life. So it’s like, you know, to describe it in the level of detail of like, you know, person x is, is walking down the street, and they would have done why but because of your product, they now do z and that’s how they’re better off as you’re just basically trying to get them to like, give me this incredibly concrete visualization, like a particular person being benefit in a particular way, that particular time. And what I usually find happens when I get tried to get them, this is one of two things it is for early stage startups, one of two things happens, either there’s a gap in their plan, like it’s like, oh, wait, I guess we need to do this thing that we hadn’t thought about. Or they actually don’t know, they actually just don’t know who they’re trying to solve what problem for what time, it turns out, their idea is, like more abstract. And so this is like that is the best thing I found to do. If I only have 10 minutes with entrepreneur, I try to do this this exercise. So

Michael Simmons 51:36

yeah, fascinating. So so I feel like some themes we’re hitting on are one is this embodiment of trying to get into that specific situation. And that really helps you think maybe more accurately to how would be in that situation to be for you, be for a customer. And then also this idea of exemplifying similar to visualizing, but it’s another way of just seeing yourself use it in different places. And disconnecting this abstract idea to lots of places and things. So it’s a rich network.

Spencer Greenberg 52:10

Yeah, exactly. You can get this weird effect where knowledge gets like isolated its own little network. You know, it’s like, I think this happens often when people like learning about parts of the brain is like, Well, you know, they imagine this picture of the brain, and then they’ve got this part, and it connects that part and this guy, but it’s like, it doesn’t tie into any of the other stuff they know. So they can’t actually use it for anything. Yeah, I

Michael Simmons 52:29

think about it as, let’s say role, like, in terms of the picture of the world map, you picture different countries, and then there’s connections between those. I’m trying to build a city in my mind, where people are just lots of things are thinking, versus I think it’s very easy to get something where you have almost different fiefdoms. And there’s no triggers to them. So it’s almost like they’re orphaned in their, like rural areas, or not a lot of lights connecting them.

Spencer Greenberg 52:53

That’s a great metaphor, I like it

Michael Simmons 52:55

So another thing is, it’s interesting, we’re going through many different ways to look at questions. So another way to think about questions is, how do you answer them? So you could think in your head, you could tell somebody your answer, you could tell, I should keep voice notes for myself. I think that’s right, writing is a big one to writing yourself. But then you can write it like I have a whiteboard over here, I’ll answer differently than if I have a small piece of paper answer differently than if I have a laptop. So I feel like how we answer actually influences a lot. How do you think about that?

Spencer Greenberg 53:32

But these days, when I’m trying to answer a question, I usually want to be able to share it with others, because it just magnifies the value. So I often frame it as like I’m writing an essay. And often when I started an essay, I have like vague ideas about where I want to say, but I don’t really know exactly what I want to say. And usually it’s an exploration of a topic. So for just for example, when I did recently is like, what does racism mean? And so I read these two books, they both talk about racism, I thought a bunch about it, I thought about all the different like times I’ve heard people talk about racism, and I realized is that there’s like this huge number of different definitions of racism. And actually, one of the things that’s confusing people so much today is that people are using different definitions and talking past each other. So out of all of that, I was like, Okay, let me condense this into something that I can share with other people. And that’s sort of like how I structured my learning path was to be able to answer the question for others. Hmm.

Michael Simmons 54:26

So I looked at it similarly, why I coined a term explanation effect. So the fact that explaining things, helps you understand it better. And I look at it as a pyramid, the top picture, this pyramid is split in two places. At the top is self explaining, though you could explain it to yourself in a lot different ways. Your writing voice or there’s also rubber ducking in programming. Have you seen a rubber ducking?

Spencer Greenberg 54:52

Is that where you tell it to rubber duck? Oh, but you explain your problem you’re having to the rubber duck and? just solve your own problem.

Michael Simmons 54:58

Yeah, exactly. Yep. And then, then once you get to the other side, it’s you’re explaining to others and there’s different levels of that there’s informal conversations, then there’s, let’s say, a mastermind more formal, it’s a mastermind conversation. And then it starts to be thought leadership where you really package it really well, to somebody, people, maybe from a broader audience could find it relevant. And, you know, if getting a livelihood that I feel like every level you go up towards makes it. So you actually learn it more deeply, the more valuable it is to other people, probably the more you’ve learned it better.

Spencer Greenberg 55:34

I think that’s right, because to make it valuable to others, you kind of need to know, you need to know a lot of details that you then don’t actually share them, but they just help you build the scaffold of like, what’s the most important part of this? And how do I say this, and so on. Actually, more and more recently, I’ve been finding a great deal of value in starting ideas as a tweet. So like, okay, I want to think about an idea. First, let me tweet about it, then, if that’s nice, because it like is a nice, small amount of time that I can use to think about, it’s just like very bite sized, it’s easy to fit into my schedule. And then I can see how people reacted it resonated people find it valuable. And then I can consider if it’s like, let’s say, I’m like, Oh, yeah, people seem to actually find this interesting and valuable, then I can consider like, okay, now let me turn it into a Facebook post. And that’s like the next level ratcheting it up. And that’s like, much more detailed and they’re on Facebook is usually where I get a lot of critique, people make a lot of suggestions for improving it. And that is, brings me the net ratcheting up one level higher, where now I’m taking all their suggestions and critiques them saying, you know, Oh, thank you. That’s a great point. Let me update the post. And it’s kind of becoming this living document. And then that leads to the final ratcheting, which is like, okay, make it into an actual essay that I’m gonna release on my website or somewhere else,

Michael Simmons 56:43

right, and then maybe a book after that, or eventually a book. And a book series, like celebs in Saratoga or something like that. Yeah, I have the same exact sort of system. It’s interesting with like, taking a step back on that I got this wording from the book called Little Bets, but talk about those systems, experimentation systems in different domains. You could apply it to movie scripts, where there’s the outlining, then storyboarding and so on. And then there’s different reviews at each level. And for hours, oh, what I think is really interesting is it’s almost it’s really a different way of thinking. It’s like a social cognition, almost. Number one, you’re getting feedback from people on what’s interesting and what’s not interesting. And then that’s guiding it. That’s like strengthening certain pathways that of your thinking you wouldn’t have gone down unless other people are interested in it. And then it’s also good to see your prediction too. Yeah. What do you mean by that prediction?

Spencer Greenberg 57:44

Well, you basically one thing that’s, that’s really important to me is to model what other people find valuable. So it helps me hone my like, internal Prediction Engine, I’m like, Will people find this idea valuable or not? Um, and I aspire to get to the point where I can just predict in advance that something will be really valuable to people. And I don’t even need to check because I’m so accurate. I’m not there yet. But I’m getting better and better. For now, a couple years, everything I post on Facebook, I make a pre prediction about how people react to it.

Michael Simmons 58:11

Interesting you put you put that in a spreadsheet?

Spencer Greenberg 58:13

Yeah, like a huge spreadsheet.

Michael Simmons 58:14

So you can actually literally see how accurate you are, you can see that actually getting better your predictions.

Spencer Greenberg 58:20

Yeah, so I had like, I have confidence intervals that I tracked out predicting a predict, like, you know, I think it’s gonna be between 20 and 35 likes and stuff like that. I will add that I think there’s one danger of doing this that people have to be careful about and steer clear of if they’re using something like Twitter to evaluate like, the residence of an idea, which is it’s very important that you focus on did this idea resonate with people where do they find it valuable? Not do people give me social kudos for saying the thing? Because, right, that’s a failure mode, where it’s just like, you’re actually just optimizing for like being likeable or like, say, you know, cheering on the thing that other people cheer on.

Michael Simmons 58:57

Right? If you say environment is important, or something, and then cheer that on.

Spencer Greenberg 59:02

Yeah, exactly. So But fortunately, I tend to write about things that are orthogonal to politics. So I don’t get like either pseudo code, social kudos or social condemnation most of the time, because people are just like, wouldn’t like this has nothing to do with like the topics that I’m used to even topics that are potentially controversial. Like, what is racism? I try to approach it in a completely orthogonal way, like at the point of view of sociologists being like, how are people using the word racism? What do they mean by that? What are the different options? Rather than trying to take a political side?

Michael Simmons 59:34

Yeah, man, I just I feel like I just seeing our conversation that I was seeing lots of different paths, they could go down that somebody pin Well, one thing in the the thought leadership ROM. So this is maybe just transitioning a little bit away from questions to the thought leadership is what what creates value long term for thought leadership? So my, okay, let me start off by giving my personal philosophy on where we are and where we’re going. And then your thoughts on that. So I personally believe that we’re in that start off with programming where we’re programming was and software was about 30 years ago. So we can take something from your head, prototyping, and computer is a software code, it can instantly run across anywhere in the world, at no extra cost. There’s a maintenance cost, but it’s super scalable. And so the software industry has really grown over the past several years, because of there’s a whole funding ecosystem of there’s a whole education accelerators support, there’s a whole philosophy about what it means to write good software or start a software company. And it’s really developed, you can really see that progress. And when it comes to ideas and turn into that, I think one it hasn’t evolved as quickly. And sometimes I’ve been wondering, okay, why hasn’t evolved, I think partially from a monetization, a lot of people who come up with ideas, they’re, they’re doing it for free, or passion or those just in the past year or two, where I feel like people like substack people are actually charging for their content. And courses are becoming bigger, and people are buying courses more often. And so, I like to think about is what does it mean to be a thought leader, just like, what does it mean to be a good software programmer or software startup. And part of it, I think, at a core level, there’s their ideas bank you have, and then there’s how you express it. And though it’s like, let’s say the expression to be how good your writing is, how good how good you are at simplifying and creating titles. And then there’s the idea part of, you have to have a large database of ideas, and be able to combine them together into really attractive ideas that people will share. And I personally believe that the most of the highest leverage thing is on learning really, highly valuable content that’s durable. That gives you the fodders that you get combine like Lego blocks that you can combine ideas together, that because you have those Lego blocks, no one else could even think about it, because they don’t have those same basics. And then the last thing is that I feel like there’s a compounding advantage that happens because like if I want to write an article about physics or something, I would have to spend a lot of time just to be able to write something interesting about it. And so if you have a large base of knowledge, there’s less feeling of competition that all these people that you could write the article that you’re thinking about. So for me, I spend a lot of my time researching because of that. And I heard you allude to things on this call about you start your day, think about value and what’s valuable to write about what’s true. And also you want to model what other people find valuable. So I hear you talk about value, but in your own words, what do you think it means to be a good thought leader? Long term?

Spencer Greenberg 1:03:04

Hmm. Yeah. Well, I like a lot of what you said. And it’s extremely hard to be novel. Right? Like, there’s so many people generating so many ideas. And personally, I think the idea of trying to be novel is like, rather overrated. And I think most the time when we think people are being novel, they’re not in the set you just in the sense that others have thought about the idea before, right? I think most of the time we call it novel, it’s not really, I’m kind of shocked sometimes to see like, a paper from 1950 discussing idea that like, is now there, just a new paper that came out in 2020. And you’re like, Are you serious? Like, you know, and I’m not someone who’s studied history deeply. But I think that there’s a lot more repetition of ideas that we acknowledge. So what I like to think about, and I believe you and I’ve discussed this before, is not so much being novel, but producing novel value. In other words, producing value that’s not currently being produced in the world that says to me what matters, not like being the first to say a certain idea which you’re probably not going to be, but I totally agree with you that if you want to say stuff that’s more unique to you, which is necessary to to produce novel value, because like if you’re just saying whatever we’re not saying that’s not not what we are either to produce things, they’re uniquely valuable. You have to push pretty far in one direction. So either you build up all these building blocks so you can combine flexibly and so that allows you to create unique value, or you go deep enough in one area. You get to sort of the edge of it. And then you can preach novel value that that edge, or you play to some strength that you’re like ridiculously unusual in. So sometimes that comes about because someone’s like an expert in to random things that are unrelated, like them as an expert in I don’t know, artificial intelligence, but also they’re an expert in I don’t know, like friendship or something like that. It’s like, wow, maybe there’s some crazy thing at that intersection. I don’t know, maybe there’s not but like, so they can get to the edge really fast by combining these like kind of weird things that nobody would combine. So that that’s a possibility, or you just have come some exceptional ability in some area that lets you push push that, you know, like you think about like Josh Waitzkin, you know, like, he clearly has an exceptional ability to learn things. And so he’s able to, like, say very interesting things about learning that other people wouldn’t have thought of. So you know, so I think that’s kind of the way I frame thought leadership is spreading ideas in a way that produces unique value that nobody else is producing.

Michael Simmons 1:05:18

Yeah. And then how do you think about, let’s just, how long do you want to do you picture yourself being a thought leader for the rest of your life?

Spencer Greenberg 1:05:25

I would, I would like to be. I mean, basically, I feel like I’m on a quest, one to understand how to figure out truths about the world. And then to to use those methods to figure out truths, and then three, to use those truths to improve people’s lives. And so for me, the idea of being a thought leader, it comes out of my life mission, because it’s like, as I’m on this quest to like, figure out how to figure out the truth, facts, you figure out the truth, and then figure out how to use the truth to improve those lives. I saw so many ideas come out of that, that then I can share with others. Right. So it’s, to me thought leadership is like a side effect of my of my life mission. It’s not the it’s not the mission of itself.

Michael Simmons 1:06:07

Yeah, yeah, I understand. And that really comes across that you’re really trying to figure out as as it sounds, like what’s true, and the Venn diagram of what’s true, and what’s valuable. But it’s interesting, I just was listening to a podcast with Noah Yuval Harari, and Bill Gates. And they were talking about how many of the most valuable things in the world like a lot of people would say religion is one of the most valuable things in their life. Or let’s say money aren’t real, in a certain sense. There’s they’re stories. And I feel like there’s a lot of beliefs that are actually really that this goes to let’s say Nassim Taleb, I feel like a lot of his stuff is kind of saying, there’s a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true in the scientific way. But they’re true in the real world, like his fat Tony, sort of way that it just works, though. Maybe we don’t have the best explanation of it. Though, sometimes I wonder about that as a as a thought leadership, too, is that there’s I guess there’s that there’s useful, but not always true.

Spencer Greenberg 1:07:10

Yeah. So for me personally, like one of my deepest intrinsic values, is, like believing true things and spreading true things. And yeah, I’m not, you know, obviously, I’m not always perfect and fulfilling this, but it really is a really deep value for me. So for me, it’s a non starter. If I think an idea is not true, if I think it’s vague, it’s false. But like a lie, but useful, I’m going to try to avoid it. There are others that say, well, maybe maybe the right line is actually for the for the greater good. And I just that just totally does that align with my value system. However, I will say that there are many, there’s a trade off between simplicity and accuracy, right? So there can be a lot of value in producing a, a model that’s like, only somewhat accurate, but it’s very simple, right? And even though it’s far from perfect, it actually improves people’s understanding. So I think that to me, that’s the question is not is the model perfect? No model is perfect. But does the model improve people’s understand from where they’re at? So an example of this is like children are often taught that like atoms are kind of like billiard balls, like bouncing around, right? And that’s not really true. We know that that’s not true. But I think it’s still useful model teach children, I would rather it’s, there’s an addendum added saying, by the way, this is just an approximation later, you’re gonna learn about this thing called quantum mechanics when you’re older, that will tell you that it’s even weirder, but this is like a decent model to get you started. And it’s much better than what you thought, you know, before you earned any science. Yeah,

Michael Simmons 1:08:42

my, I don’t, I don’t feel like I have my wording right here. But I feel like I definitely was impacted by Trump and everything. And I don’t want to go into the politics. But I feel like it’s like, it’s fairly common to say, Okay, he’s lying a lot, but it doesn’t matter at some level. He’s also the the amount of votes, he’s able to become the president of the United States. And so it almost challenged on my beliefs about how the world works. And then I just started noticing in different domains that there’s a lot of times where there’s an understanding something but if you just in terms of Okay, Let’s say there’s two parts to the world. One is understanding how physics works, right? And then that’s one way there’s truth there, that’s really valuable. And you’re not going to be able to build a rocket ship that goes to Mars by going off of non truth. You

Spencer Greenberg 1:09:39

can’t build a rocket ship of lies.

Michael Simmons 1:09:42

Exactly. But then we’re but on the other hand, we’re living in the human domain where there’s, you’re talking to paper, there’s, you’re working together and collaborating. And that’s clearly to me not build on truth. And even, let’s say money or something like that. It’s built on sometimes mutual belief, or, and so for me, I feel like there’s a lot of areas where I choose to believe things that are non provable, like, okay, I believe that life is going to get better. I believe that when I’m coaching someone, I feel like they can really have, I guess it’s more of a possibility that they can really have breakout and accomplish their goals. So it’s not exactly the same, but I feel like it’s, it starts to go into the woo land, but I feel like there’s a value to as a thought leader, that you’re able to create value by not just starting from truth that you understand where I’m going, I don’t have it well thought out. Yeah,

Spencer Greenberg 1:10:40

I do. I do. And I think this comes down to values, right? There are comforting lies, there are accompanying falses, they’re false as they help people. They’re also truths that help people. And because my value is very deeply rooted in truth. Like I find it unethical to like purposely spread lies. I just that to me, that just rules out all those methods. Like, let me give you an example, actually, to illustrate this. So I have a friend who had this saying she found helpful, which was that, like, everything that happens to you, even if it’s really bad, is the perfect thing to happen for you. Right. And she found this valuable, this made her feel better. But I would never use that method. And I also would never advocate it instead, I would say, let’s find another statement that makes you feel better about bad things. That’s actually not deceiving yourself. Because we know like, of course, the things that happen to you are not always perfect, like, you know, so how about, you know, and you’d have to experiment to figure out which one works for you. But maybe you have another thing, like, you know, everything that that bad to happen to you is a learning opportunity that it probably is true, right? Like there’s something to be learned from that. Whether it’s about your own resilience or about how to avoid that problem in the future or about you know, about the way life works or whatever. Right so I would look for something that has the benefits but without the the fall set. And yeah, good.

Michael Simmons 1:11:58

Is it actually false under like, is money falsehood like uh, you know, I’m just cuz I listen to the Yuval Noah Harari, podcast talking about money as this idea that we created or, you know, the company doesn’t exist, you know, like, there’s not like, you can’t go meet a company. It’s this idea that we create,

Spencer Greenberg 1:12:17

I would just differentiate, yeah, I would differentiate between an actual falsehood and something like money, I think of money as an intersubjective truth, which I think is how many people do it as well, where in other words, the value of money is true insofar as people believe it. But that doesn’t mean it’s false. Like if people are willing to give you a candy bar for $1, than $1 is worth a candy bar. And that is actually true. At the moment, they stopped believing it’s worth candybar, it won’t be any more.

Michael Simmons 1:12:44

But it feels like most of things. And maybe that’s maybe that’s just within your that’s still within your realm you’re calling inter subjective truths. I feel like that person what you said of your friend that everything happens, the best way possible or something like that.

Spencer Greenberg 1:12:57

Everything happens is perfect. Exactly meant to be

Michael Simmons 1:13:00

there. Would that be an interest objective truth?

Spencer Greenberg 1:13:03

I don’t think so. See, I just think that that’s false. Like, I mean, maybe there’s some weird reading of the Word Perfect there that like makes it true. But I think by a plain reading of it, it’s just a falsehood. And I think I do think that there’s a very large number of falsehoods that are spread in society today. And they’re not just inter subjective truths, which I don’t I don’t have a problem with inter Subjective Truth. These introspective truths are true as long as people can believe in them, which is a form of truth.

Michael Simmons 1:13:26

Yeah. And I think we’re probably an agreement that like blatant falsehoods of like, I don’t know, the tree is green. And then we’re saying we’re trying to argue it’s not, those don’t have it. We’re not trying to do those as thought leaders, but sometimes I just think about for people as thought leaders of where to specialize in that, if you’re trying to make the most value, trying to stay in the realm, I feel like there’s a lot value in this intersubjective truth, because that’s where people actually apply and use things. And now as humans, we’re not I feel like we’re not really we’re more designed for inter Subjective Truth than know reality truth of like physics truth.

Spencer Greenberg 1:14:08

Yeah, I think I think that the Yeah, there’s definitely to be said for that view. I think really, though, part of this is about storytelling. And the way I think about that, is that for any truth, there’s like, probably At least 100 ways to tell the story of that truth. That is, that is true. Like it’s not a lie. But the point is that any fact has many stories that you could tell around it. And it depends on like, which parts to emphasise, how much time do you spend on every part, what words you use to describe it, etc, etc. And so I think, for me, the most ethical form of thought leadership is to try to always tell the truth, you’re all human, we’re gonna sometimes fail, we’re gonna make mistakes, we’re gonna etc. But I try to always tell the truth, but then to also optimize for the the story around the truth that helps people use that truth. Right, and that story, there’s a lot of flexibility to it. Um, okay.

Michael Simmons 1:14:59

So our processing here, I think it’s an interesting topic, because it’s like, what really creates the value long term. And I think about this a lot, because I think it’s very easy as a thought leader to get caught in, okay, I just want to get the most Facebook likes, or I want to build a business. And that’s going to be the most thing versus I appreciate, let’s say in the seem to lab in the sense that you’re, you’re worth focusing on creating, first of all, he’s spent 40 hours per week learning for since he was 16. Those, you know, applying all this wisdom, he applying it to his life and becoming a trader and testing out there, then he’s studying it academically. And then he’s building ideas that could last the test of time. And I find that model of thought leadership really interesting. And so that’s partially why I’m also just asking you all these questions, it feels like, do you resonate with the seem to love model? Or do you look at yourself in as a different approach to how you’re, what you’re trying to accumulate over time and share?

Spencer Greenberg 1:15:59

Well, you know, I think that and Steven is come up with some really, really cool and powerful ideas. And it also ways of describing them and making people understand the value of them like antifragility, I think it’s really cool. And the idea of a black swan, like, surely he’s not the I don’t think he invented the concept of black swan. But I think he did a great job of like articulating the importance of it, and what people misunderstand about it, and like, you know, adding a lot of value there. So I certainly I certainly respect that a lot. But you know, it’s like, let’s take, let’s take something like internal family systems, right, is basically, you know, a way of doing therapy that involves you imagine these different parts to yourself, you know, we alluded to this earlier, from my point of view is totally false. To tell someone, you have this literal like part inside you this, you know, manager was one of the terms they used inside you, that’s like doing this thing. And you’ve got to like talk to that manager. If you communicate to someone that that’s they literally had this manager, that’s actually misleading. But to say, this is a useful introspective tool to imagine you as this manager, and then to talk to the manager. And this leads to positive outcomes. That’s a totally legitimate and, and honest way to do it. So for my Now I’m not saying people are lying when they say that they really believe in like the manager in your mind, or whatever. I’m not saying they’re lying, they actually may believe that that’s true, but I think it’s false. So to me, there’s an ethical way to do it internally, I’m assistance based on my belief system, which is to communicate why the technique is valuable, and what’s actually going on to the best of your understanding, that makes sense. It doesn’t mean you can’t do family systems, if you don’t believe that you actually have a manager. But

Michael Simmons 1:17:33

I wonder if that is actually what works long term, the part of the value of an idea that has to be appreciated by other people, and valued. Just like I don’t know, let’s just say like dating or other things, it’s not enough to be internally consistent, or like, Okay, I’m a really nice guy, or girl, but to be a certain way. And so I feel like, if you look at over, if you look at the thought, leadership space, our attention spaces, ideas competing against each other, and oftentimes, the simple ideas really win that in over time, if you even have a complex idea, that’s going to be simplified. So I’m not arguing against what you’re saying. I agree. I feel like that’s more accurate. But it also seems like what wins over time is like, it’s this simple version that people can immediately understand and has an emotional part. And so if part of your goal is to have the most value in the world, that there’s maybe there’s trade off, sometimes it sounds like you’re not willing to make those at some level. But I wonder if that would hurt long term?

Spencer Greenberg 1:18:39

Well, I don’t think it’s simple. It’s false. Like, you know, going back to this idea of like, a simple model is, you know, it’s gonna be less accurate if you’re trying to study a complex phenomenon, right? But it might, but the trade off, there’s always a trade off between, like simplicity and accuracy. And actually, as long as you’re upgrading people’s understanding, like they understand the thing better, they’re more accurate perception of like, what’s true, after hearing the idea, then before, then you’ve actually improved their thinking you’ve improved it understand the world not made it worse. If you have a simple idea that’s totally false, then you’ve downgrade their understanding the world. Now, I think in my ideal form of this, you would explain that this is a simple model, and you say this is not the complete complexity, but it’s a really useful way of capturing a lot of value in a simple thing, and so that would be the best But as long as you’re making people believe more truth, rather than less than I’m, I’m in favour. But again, I will go back to just the incredible importance of storytelling. And I think if you have a good idea that is true, you still have to work really, really hard to tell the story around it in a way that resonates with people that way that people find valuable. And a lot of work needs to go into there. And I think that that’s vastly underestimated. And basically, I think that’s how so, you know, it’s like, imagine two people, one who’s like just spouting bullshit ideas trying to optimize for like what will get clicks or what will get them famous or something, and you have another person who’s trying to say true things that are that are useful. Like, if the second person doesn’t do good storytelling, then they’re going to lose. But if they do good storytelling, then they can potentially compete and potentially even win the long term. Because people are not like total morons. Like, yeah, some people will be fooled, but other people will be like, yeah, that person’s kind of bullshit. You know, the first person is kind of bullshit. So there isn’t, there’s advantage, the truth. But also, I think at a deeper level, it’s like what kind of impact you want to have on the world, like that first person who’s just spouting nonsense, they’re actually probably going to have a net negative impact on the world. And I think that most people don’t want to do that, like they genuinely want to have that positive impact. So by constraining yourself by to things that are true, there may be simplified version of the truth, that’s fine. As long as they’re upgrading people’s knowledge, I think that’s a that’s a really useful constraint and making sure you have a positive legacy, not a negative one.

Michael Simmons 1:20:43

And how to use or one part is the idea part, and we’re talking about true and useful. How do you then think about the craft of it? You’ve talked about storytelling, there’s voice? How do you think about developing your voice and thought leadership long term?

Spencer Greenberg 1:20:58

So I am not the world’s expert story. This is something I’m still very much working on and trying to get better at storytelling. But I think there’s a lot of different elements to this. One is can you make it visual and vivid for people? I think that that’s really powerful. So another way to do it is to say, Can I like put this in a metaphor that people already relate to or understand? A third way is like, Can I give a concrete example, that like, makes this meaningful to people like, oh, I’ve seen that happen, or that’s happened to me, or Wow, that was a really amazing example, like amazing story that also illustrates a principle. So these are all aspects of storytelling. And then of course, like, if you can, if you really want to embed it in a story you want to storytelling all the way, then you need to start thinking about the narrative and like, the narrative arc, and conflict in the story, you know, maybe even Hero’s Journey or whatever, it depends how far you want to push it.

Michael Simmons 1:21:54

I’ve noticed you don’t really use as much storytelling in your your writing, I feel like it’s more, you’re exploring the idea more, and you’re really breaking it down really well and simplifying it. How do you think about, I’ll just share for myself, I sometimes I’m motivated in a similar way. And for me, storytelling, like I realised, like, helps communicate the idea. But it’s also like, it’s not as exciting for me as the learning part. Do you think about that for yourself?

Spencer Greenberg 1:22:25

Yeah. So again, you know, storytelling is it’s something I’m working on developing, and it’s, you know, very much active area of developing knowledge for me. But I think that if I want to get my ideas to a much wider audience, that storytelling is like a key aspect to that. And that’s probably why I’m so interested in it. Yeah. Right now, I’m very much focused on like, get all the good ideas that I can explain them to my audience in a way that they find valuable. And then eventually, I want to develop a really good skill of like weaving that into stories to make it widely appealing to like a much bigger audience. It’s not as much like, you know, people that are unusually reflective and unusually interested in ideas and so on. But I’m lucky that like, my initial audience I built is really an idea seeking audience that loves, you know, likes to think and so, to them, I can communicate very directly. Like, here’s a really cool idea. I learned, like, let me break it down for you. Let me give you, you know, the 10 parts of it or whatever.

Michael Simmons 1:23:19

Yeah, yeah. Well, Spencer, I feel like, this is our third podcast in 2020. I love it. I really, really appreciate how your mind works. And just you could really feel your commitment to truth and understanding how things work. And then explaining that though. I’m having fun. You’re there.

Spencer Greenberg 1:23:37

Love coming on. Thanks so much, Michael.

Michael Simmons 1:23:42

And you’ve mentioned some of your websites before, but could you just share a little bit where people can learn more about you and follow you?

Spencer Greenberg 1:23:50

Yeah, so we, as of like two weeks ago, I think we now have 57 free tools you can use on our website clearerthinking.org. So if you want to understand your values better, or you want to make better decisions, or you want to understand how cognitive biases work, then just go to clearerthinking.org If you want to learn about my work more broadly go to spark wave dot tech. So it’s dot te ch you can follow me on Twitter. I’m SPENCR, Greenberg and then I’d love for you to check out my podcast Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg where Michael is actually episode number one Yeah, I love the episode with him so much. I made it the first episode of the series, but I have basically fine intellectual conversations with brilliant guests. So awesome.

Michael Simmons 1:24:31

I highly, highly recommend the podcast to everyone. And I look forward to having our fourth conversation sometime in 2021, Spencer and I love that Thanks.

Outro 1:24:42

Thanks for listening to The Michael Simmons Show. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. If you found value. In today’s episode, we would greatly appreciate a five star rating on your favorite podcast player

Tags: Clearer Thinking, entrepreneur, mathematician, Michael Simmons, Spark Wave, Spencer Greenberg, The Michael Simmons Show

-	I teach people to learn HOW to learn
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