SPENCER: Steve, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

STEVE: I'm glad to be here, looking forward to the conversation.

SPENCER: You created ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which has had a profound impact on the way therapy is practiced. Briefly, what is ACT?

STEVE: Well, it's an attempt to kind of hack the human mind down to the smallest set of things that do the most good for the most people. It's sometimes called Acceptance and Commitment Training because it's basically relevant to almost everything we do. I can summarize 40 years of work into a single sentence that says what we're up to, if you want to hear it.

SPENCER: Yeah, love to hear that.

STEVE: Well, here's what life is asking of you, and I can defend this. It's asking you to learn how to be more open, aware, and actively engaged in a meaningful life while scaling that to your relationships and your body. That sentence covers not just ACT, but every single intervention method where we know how it works and that it works in any area of importance to human functioning. By that, I mean what we do in our life, behavior, how we feel, interact, relate, the businesses we do, the mental health problems we have, but also just how we are as human beings.

SPENCER: Wow, could you unpack that sentence a little bit, the different components of it?

STEVE: Yeah, if you unpack it, it goes into 45 years of work. This short unpacking is Open: being emotionally and cognitively flexible. Aware: able to attend on purpose, decided by you, not by being jerked around by your history or what just shows up in the moment from a deeper sense of self — a part of you that's more spiritual. We could say we can unpack that. Engaged: what do you care about? What are the qualities of being and doing you want to put into your behavior? Can you create habits around that and scale it to relationships and your body? Yeah, because you're a physical person. If you treat your body poorly, it's going to treat you poorly, and you need to learn how to read your body. Plus, relationships and culture. We're social primates. If you try to ignore that, you're ignoring a huge part of your evolutionary history and also just what brings meaning into your life.

SPENCER: Before we get more into what ACT is at its core, tell us about the evidence base for it.

STEVE: It's ginormous. If you had somebody out and said, "I do evidence-based work." They're probably talking about CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and ACT is kind of on the odd wing of that. I've been president of those CBT societies and all that. When we showed up after 20 years of development, people were threatened by it. Now it's kind of, "Okay. You're part of the tribe, but you're a little odd."

SPENCER: You're in the club now?

STEVE: The number of randomized trials gives you a sense of ACT: almost 1,500, which is about half of what all of traditional CBT has. And there's a new one every two or three days. After 20 years of development, I said, "Here's what it is. We have all four." So 20 years later, we have 1,500 and more data on how it works than any other approach.

SPENCER: For which conditions has it been proven to be effective?

STEVE: Well, that's the way we usually think. When we say conditions, we're probably thinking of disorders. What we're trying to do is instead get the smallest set that does the most things for most people in most areas. We never went in and said, "Oh, this is just for anxiety disorders or even mental health." Because of that, if you pick any one, you'd say, "Oh, I'm not sure there's enough evidence." But now there's a point where almost everybody says, "Yeah, there's enough evidence." Which is basically all of them. I know that's a little creepy to people, but there's a reason why we built it differently. We wanted to get down to the smallest set of processes that move the most good, so throw anything at me here, Spencer, and I'll see if we have some studies about it.

SPENCER: Traditionally, people find it incredibly hard to treat personality disorders like narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder..

STEVE: Okay, there's probably about — if you climb into that concept. But I have to put "personality disorder" in quotes, because I think that's basically wrong. I don't think there really is such a thing as a "personality disorder." But put "personality disorder" in quotes. Total across all of them, probably about 40–50 randomized trials. If you take the big ones like borderline, and then if you start breaking it down, probably about 25 or so. Of course, DBT — dialectical behavior therapy. Have you ever heard of that one?

SPENCER: Yeah.

STEVE: My good friend Marsha Linehan co-developed DBT just as ACT was developing. And that kind of echoed off each other to some degree, because it's been around that long and the processes that are in DBT are the same as the ones that are in ACT. And it's that sentence I sent you, I just told you. So, here's the thing, when you're talking about a personality disorder, you're talking about things that are deeply ingrained, patterns that grow across time and place. Okay, that kind of change takes a long time, and it's not a matter of fixing you. It's a matter of evolving in a positive way. There are a whole lot of your friends that can be labeled with a personality disorder. There are a whole lot of people you respect that can be labeled with it. And your job when you're struggling with that isn't to fix yourself or become somebody else, but to figure out how to take some of the things in there that people are seeing as problematic, polish off those edges, take what's unique and special about you and develop your life. But that's the same as everybody. So the whole concept of personality. Can we take just a moment to talk about that?

SPENCER: Let's do it.

STEVE: Okay, you probably know there's the Big Five, right?

SPENCER: Yep, Big Five, OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism model.

STEVE: Yep, exactly. And here's the deal, it's a statistical artifact. It's not real.

SPENCER: And why is that?

STEVE: Well, because if you follow individuals over time and situations, it's an old idea, and goes back to Walter Mischel and so forth, but without the stats, then to do what we know now, and then you look at how many different ways of being do you have in different situations, and do you fall into traditional categories? We were looking at a data set, and then my team had a massive data set on that, and the answer was about less than a third of the people could be categorized by the Big Five. So how can the Big Five be all forms of personality when two thirds of the people walking around don't fit it? When you just do this, instead of just taking a couple snapshots of them, put them into a big bell curve, follow them over time. Look at how the different ways are. How many different ways do they have interacting? And you'll find some people with two, some people with seven, some people with nine, some people with one. How many can be fully characterized by the Big Five? Less than a third. It's a statistical artifact that comes from treating bell curves as ways of characterizing human beings, which is the error that's inside the DSM. It's the error that's inside all of the conversations that we have about human behavior, because we have 150 years of being socialized to a statistical lie. It goes back to Galton.

SPENCER: So one way to try to defend the Big Five is to say, "What it's trying to talk about is a time average. So if you're averaging across people's typical behavior and their typical environments, that it categorizes them into those groups, or really based on those factors, rather than two groups." Do you think that that's not true?

STEVE: No, it's worse than that, because it's also averaging across people and the metric that's being used to determine how it fractionates is between people. In order to go from variation between people to changes within a person over time and situation, you have to assume what's called ergodicity, which means that where you are in a bell curve predicts your future over time. Statistical physics worked this out 120 years ago. It was proven science almost a hundred years ago, and here are the conditions under which you can make that assumption. There can be no trends, and every person follows the same dynamic model. There's no living thing that does that. It's called ergodic. Go to your AI tool. Put in ergodicity, e-r-g-o-d-i-c and ask it a deep question. Put it on deep research, any of your tools, and say, "Does this violate ergodicity?" Prepare to breathe deeply, because the things that you rely on and call good science are based on a statistical error.

SPENCER: Let's dig into ergodicity. As I understand it, please correct me. It's the idea that if you follow one individual or one unit over time and take an average, you'll get the same result as if you were to look at a large population of individuals at one time slice and take an average. So the average of one person over time compared to the average of many people at one time, and that basically you get the same result. Is that correct?

STEVE: Not just the average, but also the dynamic model. If you wanted to speak in terms of averages, you could say, "Okay, the same mean and standard deviation over time with individuals will be identical to the mean and standard deviation of a collection of individuals at a given point in time." Ergodicity was about the relationship of time and space. It was in physics, and it was initially about how you could describe a molecule of gas based on a volume of gas when they couldn't measure the molecules. But now it's used for water systems and all kinds of things. Every physics major knows it backwards and forwards. It's critical. It was only 20 years ago that it was first noticed to apply to psychology, and it's only within the last four or five years we've been on this big time beating the drums where people are saying, "Wait a minute." So, yeah, you got it right? Same dynamic model and mean for every person over time as for the aggregate of people at a given point in time, it's not real. When we look at the violations of this, it's violated not a little bit, but hugely. I can give you a description of that and show you how we know that if you want to. It's not too geeky, actually, and it's pretty important.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's good. Let's do it. I'd also love to hear an example of maybe a trait where it's violated.

STEVE: Well, the very word "trait" has to be modified, because what you mean by a trait has to change once you really go into clearer thinking about how to think about particularity. Don't get confused. It's not the group versus the individual; it's the aggregate or ensemble versus the particular. When you do group statistics and you have groups, you have to correct for that because of the intraclass correlation statistical issues. The groupiness inside has to be corrected. So-called group statistics are ensemble or collective statistics, where you assume each unit is fully independent, and you put them in a big pile. Okay, so you're asking for an example of a place where that becomes really critical.

SPENCER: Yeah, that maybe could make the idea land of why.

STEVE: Let me start with this. There's a thing called meta-analysis. When you are trying to figure out what a whole bunch of studies show, you have a statistic called I-squared, and there's a variance of it that basically does this: How much of the impact of this thing in these different studies, when we're not assuming we randomly drew from a population where we're assigning what we found to other random samples, we're just wanting to know what the overall picture is when I compare this to this with a whole bunch of studies. It's called meta-analysis. It doesn't make that assumption that we're randomly sampling and randomly applying because it knows people do studies for a particular reason at a particular site.

SPENCER: If people are studying meditation, for example, they're not doing a completely random sample of all possible meditation studies. They're researching particular things to study.

STEVE: Over here, this person wanted to do that, but if you publish something in the Cochrane Review, or something where you do meta-analyses, you have to show that this statistic asks for the difference between the outcomes in these different studies. That is not random. Random is fine, but systematic, more than 50%. If 50% of what's going on there is well over here in California, at Bob's clinic, it worked this way; out there in London, at Susie's hospital, it worked that way. The statistic you don't get into the geek of it that says, "There's systematic differences going on. We don't know what it is." It could be over here, everybody believes that this one's better than that. Over there, it's in a chaotic environment where the people you're drawing from are different. I don't know why. Okay, 50% is the cutoff because if you say, "Hey, CBT is better than emotion-focused therapy," and more than 50% of what you're saying is due to systematic differences that you don't know what they are between the places you did the study, you have to be careful. If it's more than 75%, the Cochrane review says, "Whoa. Wait a minute. I'm not even sure you should publish the mean." What does it mean? At most, it's accounting for a quarter of what's going on. If you said, "Emotion-focused therapy is better," yeah, and at best, it's accounting for a quarter of what's going on there. And the 75% you don't know why, maybe you should just wait until you figure out what the systematic differences are. Are you with me on this so far?

SPENCER: Yep.

STEVE: So all you need to think is a statistic. It gives you a percentage of non-random, meaning real and systematic differences. Okay, now that you picked something, any trait, and I'll tell you what happens when you look at one person at a time. Let's take something, name a trait, any trait.

SPENCER: Neuroticism from the big five.

STEVE: All right, we're going to do neuroticism. I love it. We're going to look at how that plays over time. We'll have a measure of it. We'll measure, let's say, the relationship between neuroticism and emotional restrictiveness.

SPENCER: What's emotional restrictiveness?

STEVE: You know of being unwilling to experience your own emotions.

SPENCER: Okay.

STEVE: And we're going to have good measures of both, and we're going to follow, let's say, 200 people for a couple of months. And then here's what we do. We say, "What if each person is a study? How much do these link together, person by person by person by person?" Now we'll come up with what we would do with normal statistics. We'll create the average for all of them, typically at any one slice in time. If you're lucky, you may pre-post follow-up, maybe three points in time, okay, but just a few. Now, you put the I-squared metric on it. We've done this. You know what is the average I-squared we're finding when we do traits that are common, the average, and we've been looking for four years at a whole bunch of data: 0.88.

SPENCER: Wow.

STEVE: What does that mean? 88% of what's going on is due to systematic, not random, differences between people, but we don't know what they are.

SPENCER: So what does that mean in the context of people? Because with studies, you could say, well, that might be due to researchers making decisions about what to study or how to study.

STEVE: Here's what it means, my friend, the stuff you talk about on this podcast, the things that people read, the things that they try to drive their lives by, are somewhere in those concepts that can account for somewhere around, if that held, and I think 88 might be too high. Might be too high, that could account for 12% of what's going on.

SPENCER: And then what is the other stuff? So what's the 88%?

STEVE: What is the other stuff? What is the 88%? How are we going to find that? Now think about this, friends. Think about what we're doing in this so-called science of psychology. Let's just take any kind of typical concept you relate to often. Here's the way it works, Spencer. I'll take your picture. Now I really want to understand you, so here's how I'm going to do it. There's somebody over there, I'll take their pressure. There's somebody over there, I'll take that. "Oh, do you know that you're different from that one, different from that one, different from that one, but kind of like that one in a snapshot?" Now, I know you. Wouldn't you think that's insane? Okay? I said, "Well, wait a minute. I don't want to minimize what's good." I'll take three snapshots of you, pre, post, follow-up. Now I understand you. Here. You're at the 98th percentile.

SPENCER: So do you think most of what's going on is that time-variant process that's being captured?

STEVE: It isn't just time-variant, but it's time and situation. We call it life. Yeah, most of what's going on is life. And here we have this science that's supposed to be about how the particular organisms interact in their world, historically and situationally, and to come up with concepts that are precise and that apply to a lot of things and that don't contradict when you move from biology to psychology to sociocultural. They should all fit together. Okay, that's a good idea, but then we're relying on measures and statistical analytic tools and the concepts that come from them for dirty reasons we can get into that are 150 years old. There's a reason why it's like this that treats you as a snapshot and gives you concepts based on what snapshots look like differently between people, without looking first at how to characterize anyone. Because, look, Spencer, we have examples of studies where the average says, "This is what's true, and we have high-density longitudinal time and situation data on a whole bunch of people, and no one is average." You want an example of that?

SPENCER: Yeah, let's give an example.

STEVE: All right, because this is an old story from Peter Molenaar, who was the first person to really say in 2004, by golly, we're screwed, because ergodicity applies to people, and all of psychology has been making this error. It's a classic study on why planes were crashing when jet planes showed up. Do you know this story?

SPENCER: I have heard it, yeah.

STEVE: Have you heard of it?

SPENCER: Yeah. But tell it.

STEVE: It's a good one. Planes got fast. They had more and more crashes, and they were convinced it must be some sort of error on the part of the pilot. Somebody thought, "Well, wait a minute, maybe we've normalized the average pilot," because they're trying to pick pilots who are seven and a half feet tall or four feet tall. You even have to be a certain size to be a pilot in the military. These are military jets; you have to be a certain size, proportion, and there are about five or ten things that you really have to do to be able to fly a plane with your hands, feet, and body. That's why you don't allow people who are 400 pounds to be military pilots or who are three feet tall. You keep it in a range, and so, well, maybe they change, so we'll re-norm them. They had ten features that they thought were critical for flying the plane, and they had about 4,000 pilots. How many of them were within the standard deviation, let's say, of the mean necessary in terms of how long your arms are, how much strength you have to pull the stick, can your feet reach the pedals, all those things? How many, after almost 4,000 pilots on the ten most critical things, were kind of average enough that the plane should work for them?

SPENCER: See, as a mathematician, I know that if these traits are independent, you're in big trouble because it's going to be exponential. To get one, okay, to get a second, a third, a fourth, it's going to be exponentially.

STEVE: Exactly, you know the answer. How many were there?

SPENCER: I'm probably one or two or zero, yeah, something like that.

STEVE: Okay, so then they went down to three. Just pick three of the 10 randomly. How many could at least be within a standard deviation of the mean on at least three of the critical characteristics to fly the plane, less than 5%, and it's for the reason you just specified. But Spencer, if you know that those things are in all of our conversations at the kitchen table, "Oh, my child is in special ed. Mine's in gifted and talented." That's predicting their future. It's based on the ergodic error. It depends on context and what happens. Can I tell a personal story to explain?

SPENCER: Yes.

STEVE: My son was below the first percentile in strength when he was three years old. I was told he had a genetic disorder. Do you know why they told me he had a genetic disorder? Because he was below the first percentile. That's it. That was the only data, and I was sent to the physical therapist from the pediatrician, yes, at one below the percentile. What this means is unmeasurably low. I didn't know why; you can't even characterize it. And yeah, he couldn't hold a knife, he couldn't hold a fork, he couldn't cut meat, he couldn't hold a pen, he couldn't write, he couldn't do monkey bars, he could do sit-ups, and it persisted. Okay, so what did they tell us to do? They said, "Don't ever let him be in sports because he will always be laughed at," and he was. He would come home from pre-kindergarten weeping because nobody wanted him on their teams. Okay. And somebody along there, after the tests, he has a genetic disorder, said, "At least you should put him in martial arts or something where he can get some exercise. And it's all individual, and you'll never have to be embarrassed." Okay? And I'd have to sit there and listen, "Well, I'm committed to Black Belt excellence for my son." And thinking, "Son, you're never, ever, ever going to get a black belt. They don't give pity black belts." Yes, there is no dojo I can put you in that will give you a pity black belt. And being a good father, I didn't teach him how to throw a ball. He could hardly throw one. It wasn't fun, anyway. My elder son, I'm out there playing catch with him and seeing if he can throw a screwball. Okay. So fast forward 11 years, and his really second mother, Michelle Weaver, says, "If he's ever going to get a black belt, he has to get way, way, way stronger. And I've got a guy who I think can do it." So I get sent to this guy named Max McManus. You've probably never heard of him. Ever heard of a half-pipe skier in Truckee? Okay. So she said, I've got this coach who worked with David Wise, who won silver in the last one, gold in the one before that. Okay, crazy. I got in there and I said, "I want you to work with my son. He has a genetic disorder," and he looks me in the eye and says, "I don't give a shit about that. Let's see what he can do." And he had him doing the craziest exercises, and he was saying things like, you can't do it. My son would say, "I cannot try. Let me try." "Nah. Nah, you're too weak." "Again. I want to try." "Well, okay, you did that one. I bet you couldn't do it when the entire..." He's got this kid's head spun around. Okay, but here's the end of the story. He gets his black belt. He becomes a teacher in the dojo. He gets his second black belt. He has to work three times as hard as you would. Who cares? He's a monster. He's stronger than me. He starts playing basketball. He's at Purdue right now, basketball insane. And what are our conversations? We talk every week about how his basketball team is doing and how many points he scored, and he's not a great basketball player yet, but he probably never will be, but he's getting pretty good, and he can jump pretty high, and you would not want to hold on to that pad when he does his black belt stuff. Spencer, this story is everywhere. We're telling people to live inside these categories that are lies because they never modeled the ideographic developmental conditions where you can move from one place to another, and people come and listen to your podcast because that's what they want, and we're feeding them stuff that is based on delusion and a dirty history, if you want to explore that.

SPENCER: Yeah, so what's the history? Tell me about that.

STEVE: It's an easy way to know the answer, but I bet some in the audience don't. If you just look at traditional biostatistics, let's say, and I'll mention a few things: Fisher's z, Pearson's r, standard deviation, or the Yates correction on a chi-squared. Okay, I just mentioned four people. What were they professors of?

SPENCER: I don't know. I would say statistics, but I think you're going to tell me I'm wrong.

STEVE: You're wrong. Eugenics. Eugenics is where they came from. The biostatistics we're sitting on were designed to categorize people based on between-person, de-contextualized, not temporal statistics. When you read your psychology book, it says that's what real science is. Almost not even a single textbook — there's only one or two — will tell you that, by the way, two-thirds of the Presidents of the American Psychological Association from 1892 to 1947 were card-carrying eugenicists. Eugenics stuck in the U.S.A., not in Germany. You're thinking, "Oh, the final solution." Yeah, they took the laws written here. It started in Europe with Galton, etc., but we're the ones who ran with it. It was resisted by the psychoanalytic crew in the U.K. They didn't want to run there. We ran with it. When the Third Reich got going, they took the Virginia laws, but every state had them that said you can sterilize people against their will if they're different. So here's the thing: I'm not saying, "You're a racist and an anti-Semite if you use Pearson's correlation." This is not cancel culture. What I'm saying is these tools were allowed to take hold in our culture worldwide over the last 150 years, originally for purposes that are dirty and anti-Semitic and racist, and all the biases you can imagine. Now that's not what we're doing. The concepts we're using to understand our lives are built on tools that were for that so profoundly that it's only been within the last 20 years, and intensively within the last six to eight, that there's a group of folks out there saying enough is enough. We need concepts that are built on modeling human lives over time, one at a time, or one couple or family at a time, and then aggregating in ways that allow us to characterize what the life journeys of people are, good, better, and different. And ACT is based on that, by the way, and there are a few traditions that were included in what led to ACT, but yeah, that's enough to light my hair on fire, but I don't have any.

SPENCER: Almost all the statistics in psychology are based on correlations and regressions, and very little is based on time series of individuals.

STEVE: To make sure that people understand, I'm not saying, "All that stuff out there is bad." There are things in there. If you have a truly random sample and you are applying it to truly random things, population-based, policy-based, you better feed it with truly random samples. Don't just have a sample of convenience and then use these methods and think you can do public policy. You have to really do the hard work. The stats are fine, the formulas are fine. It's the use case that's wrong. The use case for what people want from a podcast like this, or what they want from psychological science, if you're thinking clearly, is, how can I get better? Most people listen right now because of that, and you need to understand that you're being fed false ideas. Can I go on my own box to prove it to you?

SPENCER: Sure.

STEVE: Because when I discovered this, I said, "Okay, I spent my life getting to the smallest set and most good for the most things." I even gave you the formula: open, aware, and actively engaged. Let's take something like emotional openness, being more accepting. If you're a first responder and you're out on the street, being emotionally open predicts really bad outcomes for you. Think about why. I've got to get in there with somebody saying, "Help me, help me." And you look at him, "You're going to die, friend." It's called triage for a reason. Three categories. You don't need my help, you want my help, but it won't help you, or I can actually help you, and I want to do that, third group. Does it make sense? Can you imagine being an ambulance driver, policeman, fireman, or military asking people to do that job over and over again? Take first responders, and this is hard. This is not the time to be crying. I don't want an ambulance driver who's crying trying to help me into a gurney to save my life. If you don't, then go home and find a way to open up emotionally. You're hammering down martinis and you're slapping your spouse, which is what happens. What training do we give to first responders? Nothing on what they really need, because what you're going to need is emotional openness. When it's needed, that's harder. You have to be a master of it. There are some traditions. The samurai were meditators for a reason. There are some traditions we stumbled into, but there are also things in Western culture where boot camp is shut up and do it. Take the cotton out of your ears and shove it in your mouth. That kind of training may get you to stand in a swamp and shoot at people, but it's not going to deal with the suicidality crisis in the military.

SPENCER: I think you're pointing out two types of dependency. One is that what traits are useful depends a lot on the context. If you're a first responder, you might need different traits. But also, even a first responder might need different traits at different times. So it can be even time-dependent within the same context.

STEVE: Trait, can we call it skills?

SPENCER: Sure.

STEVE: Because any of the traits turned into a skill will be overextended. I will just use an example. I'm the champion of emotional openness: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, right? Acceptance means not tolerance, resignation, just taking the gift that's offered, accepting. Still in our English here, "Will you accept this?" You don't mean, "Will you tolerate it?" I mean, it's so precious. I want you to willingly take it. Will you willingly take your emotions as a source of wisdom and learn how to navigate your life? Great. There are times when you should not do that. We will never get to that from group statistics, I just may or may not. They are from ensemble statistics. We'll never, ever find when we're going one. It's sobering. It means let's push the reset button culturally and go back to the basics of one important person at a time. There are some really important wings of... can I use an example in psychology? It's not a popular example, but it's the one I came from. I originally wanted to be a Maslow peak experiences kind of guy, but I got disappointed with him because he didn't believe experimental science could give us that. He thought he needed a different kind of science, which was more like history, and I didn't think that was really all we needed. Then I read Walden Two, and I became a Skinnerian. The Skinnerian principles are based on a few animals highly examined over time and then over and over again to the point of boredom. Reinforcement works, stimulus control works. If you want to see a psychologist and you've got kids, let's say, or need some work, you're going to use behavioral principles as part of what you're doing. It's not all of it; it's part of it. It withstood the test of time because it was built to apply to particular people. There are other fields that have done that too, some wings of neuro, some wings of developmental, but they were just overwhelmed with the tsunami wave of ensemble statistics, I'll call it, and that contains within it the toxic idea that you should understand your particularity by looking at how you compare to averages of a whole bunch of people. That's just not true.Can I suggest something that people do?

SPENCER: Sure.

STEVE: Here's a takeaway. Take anything that you care about or want to do and then sit down and create a little diagram. Here's what I want to do. What do I know in my life that lifts me up? What do I know in my life that pushes me down? Put little arrows. Spend 10 minutes doing it now. Get out a sheet of paper and monitor what you're doing in the things that maybe lift you up or push you down. Do it every day, because you can't trust your memory when you just say, "Oh, I'm like this," and then look at what you've looked at. You can put it through an Excel spreadsheet. There are some statistical problems in doing that, but they're minor compared to the big problem I'm talking about. Here's another way to say it: Learn from your own experience, but do it systematically, and you will have a better chance of coming up with a psychology that makes sense than reading psychology books because they're based on the ergodic error.

SPENCER: Can I push back a bit, and then you can tell me I'm wrong? You can tell me what's wrong with my reasoning.

STEVE: Please.

SPENCER: Okay, great. So my first pushback is that if you measure people's big five traits at one point in time, and then you measure them again a couple of years later, you'll find that they're actually very similar. You'll get some deviation, but not very much. So what explains that? And why is that not a problem for this?

STEVE: Because each statistical summary is based on your error term being based on between-person variance, rather than entirely within-person variance, but then in a way that isn't contaminated by between-person variance. In other words, in order to really see the particular or apply to the particular, you have to start with a particular, and if you allow it to be shared, it alters your statistics. So that's the error. The reason that it won't work is that if you instead took the number of people you want to have a hundred people, you followed them in that pre-test, you know that test-retest reliability, and you followed each one and modeled each one first without sharing any variance between them. Look, Spencer, what label would you give yourself in Big Five?

SPENCER: I'm high in conscientiousness, openness, low in neuroticism, behind anxiety, and fairly extroverted, quite agreeable.

STEVE: Let's grab extrovert. Okay, all the time, everywhere?

SPENCER: No, I'm not all the time.

STEVE: No, the answer is no. Now combine it with the other things, and you say, "Yeah, but sometimes this and sometimes that." If I do it all the time everywhere, over and over again, each time, you'll say no. What happened to that variance? You think that's just random? Is it random all the time? Could be. It could be, though. What's happening is your concepts don't even allow you to look at the betweenness, where you're neither, or there's entire other variables. It isn't just the Big Five that was fed into. If you've got things like self-determination theory, which I kind of like, and I think Rich and Ed did some cool work, you end up with three motivators, really. Really? No, I think it's way more if you slow it down, and I'm trying to get some time with him to have that conversation. So, what's wrong with it is that the difference from what you think is going on cannot be told to you because you established a filter that will not allow you to really investigate the not always answers you gave. If you do a deep dive in those, it fractionates. Can I give an example that's more kind of immediately in front of you? All right? I'd ask people listening to me, just look at the tip of your finger. Pick any finger. If you don't like what I'm saying, you could pick that one too, but I'm doing the index finger. Okay, at the tip there, that's less than a square inch of skin. Okay. If every fingerprint was a grain of sand on the earth, in order to have a reasonable probability of finding a square inch of skin that's like that, my question is, how many Earths would you need?

SPENCER: You mean hypothetical fingerprints, not real ones actual people have.

STEVE: You can take a real one and look at the variability and work with AI and ask it the question. I'm just giving you the answer, but you can do it in 10 minutes with a good AI question. The answer is more than a million Earths. Every grain of sand on every Earth, more than a million Earths. Okay? That's how unique less than a square inch of your skin is. Now what's going on underneath it is a small set of processes, but they combine, and they combine in ways that you were onto when I was asking how many flyers? And you knew to do the math and say it was really low, maybe zero. Because if they're independent, they have these effects. Well, if instead you dig down to how many processes are involved, maybe small. But when they interact, like fractals or something, you can get questions like this. Now apply that to yourself. How unique are you?

SPENCER: Yeah, well, people are staggeringly unique, almost unbelievably unique.

STEVE: Yeah, you'd have to say there's no one in the universe ever, ever, ever, if you shuffle a deck of cards adequately. Have you ever looked at stats of how many years it would take to get a deck that's shuffled the same way?

SPENCER: Yeah, it's always crazy to think that people are playing games of chess that have never been played before, which is really a bizarre idea. You think surely every game of chess has been played, but not even close.

STEVE: So we have these grotesquely simplifying concepts that we try to apply to our life that are based not even on the data that could allow you to characterize how you got your uniqueness. Let's say we're just going to count up. Okay, deep, clear thinking. How about a pattern of thought? How unique is your pattern of thought? Underneath ACT is a thing called Relational Frame Theory. A very vibrant and active area. I'm really proud of that. If there's anything I can say, yeah, I developed that. I originated from ACT. I can find Relational Frame Theory. I say, "Yeah, that was Steve," and there are hundreds of studies on it. If you have a kid who can't speak, run, don't walk, find somebody who knows something about Relational Frame Theory. Back in the day, usage-based models were laughable and Chomsky was dominant, and RFT is 40 plus years old. Now we're discovering with DeepSeek or usage-based cognitive models how powerful they are. But here's a thing I want to put in front of you in terms of clearer thinking. If you wanted to characterize people by particular patterns of thinking, but you actually wanted to dig down to the fractal-like process that produces these patterns, answer this question: how many thoughts are in your head, potentially? If by that I mean you're going to relate something with all of its characteristics to something, in some way, to something else with all of its characteristics.

SPENCER: Do you mean potential thoughts, or thoughts at a given time?

STEVE: Potential thoughts.

SPENCER: Oh, well, that's ridiculously huge. There are so many. It's a combinatorial explosion, rate of possibility.

STEVE: Exactly. I've done the math on it; the answer is more than there are molecules in the known universe. Except now, with our telescope, the known universe may have just expanded by 50%, so I have to change my stat. Your potential for thinking is virtually infinite, even because all I'm giving you is a sentence with its characteristics. You have thousands of relations. Is the cause of, is the father of, is better than, and on and on to this, with its characteristics? Each one of those sentences could be meaningful and even true, and it's more than there are molecules in the universe in your head right now. If you're reasonably dedicated and educated with a reasonable vocabulary, we're going to categorize people by a few patterns of thinking. Really? That's who they are?

SPENCER: I agree that you can't characterize who someone is in that way. But to give another little pushback here. If I know someone tested 99% on extroversion relative to the population, I probably can predict quite a few things relatively accurately about them, such as how much time they spend with people versus alone, how they tend to interact when they're at large parties. I'll be fairly accurate about a bunch of those things if they're way high at extremes. What do you think about that?

STEVE: Well, if you don't allow context to vary, you probably can do a lot. You can have some predictive utility. I'm not saying that these aggregate concepts are useless, but let's just test to see how useful they are. So let me give you an example of a use case that would be really important to most people. Let's deal with mental disorders. Okay, there's a lot of them, and science has been on it for the last 50 years. Hundred years ago, not really, but evidence-based therapy using science, including randomized controlled trials and all that, I just said a little bit pridefully. ACT has almost 1500 randomized trials. 20 years ago, after 20 years of work, it had four. Now it has, okay, because we did the work before that. Now, let me ask you this question: how many syndromes or disorders? In the last 40 years, how many disorders have turned into entities where they came from, how they developed that way, and what to do about it? Why does that work?

SPENCER: Well, in medicine, tons. In psychology, probably almost none, if not zero.

STEVE: That's right, there's none in 50 years, okay? Because when you get there, you have a disease. What we've been doing is applying a latent disease model using statistical tools that allow these latent concepts to be there, like personality types, drive behavior, etc. All right, let me ask you another question. How many disorders where we brought the full set of science and statistical tools we've got now have led to clearly progressive outcomes over the last 40 years, in well-done meta-analyses?

SPENCER: You mean progressive, you mean that we've actually been improving outcomes over time. Is that what you mean?

STEVE: It's exactly what I mean.

SPENCER: Yeah, my understanding is that the technique that CBT uses doesn't work better today than it did 50 years ago. But I guess maybe you could debate that.

STEVE: Yeah, over the last 35 to 40 years, the answer, as far as I can tell, is none. None. The only ones that look like it are ones where nobody was researching that. Now they are. In the early days, when we went from just whatever you felt like doing to using behavioral principles and reasonable early cognitive behavioral therapy and stuff, we probably had a little bump there. There was good work going on. Had a little bump. Okay, that's over. So here's what I'm trying to tie back to. You're saying, "Yeah, but I've got some evidence that — at least predictively — it does some work." Yeah. It's not that our concepts haven't done any work, but the work we really want, which is how to be better, how to have lives that really work, how to relate so that we're running businesses better, how to be more comfortable in our own skin. We're at a flat line or down. I can show you some areas where the meta-analyses have a slope that looks like that. It's sloping down, not up. So, yeah, I'm with you on, "Let's defend it by utility." But then if you're going to do that, Spencer, you have to look at utility in a slightly broader way. You can't just say, "Yeah, I can account for some of the variance by saying that person has that personality type," and then, yeah, when they have a real problem, I don't know what to do with them. Or, here's another one that's a little darker. The same things that allow you to say that will also say women are not very good at math. They'll also say black people are less intelligent. That's a lie, both of them, and how do you defend it? Bell curves. There's a reason why that dirty book written by Herrnstein and Murray is called The Bell Curve, because it's only when you objectify and dehumanize human beings as snapshots, instead of living over time and situation, human beings and have ways of looking at that and even talking about that that uplifts people. I mean, for goodness' sakes, take up my IQ. Look at the dirty history of that, where they suppress the evidence that IQ can even change. Do you know that history?

SPENCER: Well, I know it can change negatively, like if you get head blows or if you take too many drugs, and I know it can change positively when you're very young. But is there good evidence it can change positively?

STEVE: Well, they call it fluid intelligence because it's a fixed part, the raw g, and g goes all the way back to Galton. This is an old, old idea, and I'm not saying this totally privately. My mentor's mentor's mentor had the first infant intelligence test and was a card-carrying eugenicist. My own academic line can be traced back to this. But then you got things like black people moving from the South to the North, and they're on cue jobs by 10 points. How did that happen? Or sometimes exactly in the areas supposedly that are fixed. So I'm back to my son. I was told he had a genetic disorder and he could never, ever, I shouldn't even teach him to throw a ball, and his personality when he became a teacher at a dojo fundamentally changed. His confidence level went from here to here. His social ability went from here to here. So we've been selling people short inside these same things that are, yeah, maybe they capture some of it, some of the variance. I'm not saying that's useless, and under certain conditions, it's actually even good policy making. If you have true application to the whole population, and you really drew from that population when you did your original data, you have to have both, though. Don't just give me any stat thing of feed, garbage in and get garbage out, and bad policy, but we've so overplayed it, and now we're at a dead end. And I think society should say enough is enough. If you can't show me that you can do better by speaking about my kids, my life that way, just shut up and go away. Because we've got plenty of internet influencers out there just saying whatever comes to their head. If we're going to do some clear thinking, let's do clear thinking about how we produce a progressive culture that includes science, not as the only voice. For one reason, when you get in there, it turns out the wisdom teachers and the artists and the dancers and the songwriters were on to a lot of these really important processes that sentence I gave you, any good novelist could probably have told you even more than that. Everybody listening to me already knew what I gave as an answer. I can prove that to you. You want me to prove it? You already knew what I had to tell you here.

SPENCER: Yeah, go for it.

STEVE: Think of somebody who profoundly lifted you up, Spencer. Anybody. I won't know who it is, but I will ask you some questions, and you have to tell me who it is.

SPENCER: Sure.

STEVE: Profoundly lifted you up in your life, coach, parent, lover, spouse, friend, therapist, anyone. All right, you got one in your mind? When you were with them, did you feel accepted for who you really are? Were you constantly being judged, or was that sort of outside the window?

SPENCER: No, I wasn't being judged.

STEVE: When you were with them and your eyes met, did you see a conscious human being who was conscious of you as a conscious human being? Were you connected in consciousness? Or did you see dead eyes?

SPENCER: No, they didn't have dead eyes.

STEVE: They're with you, okay? And were they present with you, or were they looking at their watch, only half with you, waiting for the meeting to end?

SPENCER: Definitely present.

STEVE: They were present. Would they ask you to violate your values, on second thought?

SPENCER: Absolutely not.

SPENCER: Absolutely not. I wouldn't do that. When you were together and something happened, could you adjust to that? Or did it always have to be one way? Did it have a sense that you could be in different environments, in different ways, and it would be okay?

SPENCER: Yeah, it was more flexible.

STEVE: More flexible. Those six things are open, aware, and actively engaged questions, including the six things I just said. So here's what I wanted to tell you, Spencer. You need to pick a hero, a guide, somebody you look up to. The word that we use in ACT is called psychologically flexible. Those concepts came ideographically in ACT. They're based on behavior analysis, which is an intermediary graphic science, and they are so profoundly applicable. I've never had a single person when I do this game give me anything other than the six answers I knew they would give me, which means everybody listening to me knows the organ between your ears doesn't know. The organ between your ears will say, "I'll only be part of the group if everybody likes me, and I only want to feel good things, and I don't want to have worrisome thoughts," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't mean it. We're going to try to earn our way in by not accepting ourselves for who we really are, not being open to our own emotions and thoughts. Go through the six questions, apply it to yourself, and you'll see that the tools we're trying to apply are not what we know works intuitively, and we've got science, I think, fighting us because of this one-size-fits-all, ergodicity averaging thing where you're being compared, not even to a person, but to an abstraction called the mean.

SPENCER: How does ACT avoid that failure mode?

STEVE: By focusing on processes that we know apply in an ideographic way and being interested in how they fit together. It would be if I'm interested in the fingerprint, but I knew the fractal processes that produced it, and I was really focusing on those processes. That's what we've been trying to do. Now I'm giving you some evidence that when we go idiographically, you can't rely on them except in combination. We looked at some data recently where people who are clear and connected with their values predict they are less likely to be entangled with depression. We looked one at a time, and sure enough, about one out of 12 people. The more clear and connected they are to their values, the more they're entangled with sadness, which is a single item way of thinking about what we might call depression. Now we dive in and start unpacking that, and we see that sometimes values take you towards things that are emotionally hard, and you don't know what to do with it. If you were really living your values-based journey full on, you might be out there, really asking that girl to go out on a date with you, and she says no. Do you have the skills to step into that moment? It's not one size fits all these processes, and it's not just ACT. When we did this meta-analysis of mediational analysis, we looked at why change happens. We looked at every study ever done in the history of the world that properly modeled the answer to the why question, and why psychotherapy worked. Then we looked at only the ones that were replicated. 42% of them used ACT measures for the mediator. If you got a little more expansive, 55% obviously were ACT. But the rest of them all fit in this now bigger thing of open, aware, and actively engaged. Inside our psychotherapy journal, the science journal, we figured out it's right there if you just summarize it. We wrote an article summarizing how change happens. But we need now to learn to apply it to the particular person in a way that carries them from this moment to that moment to that moment. I see ACT as a technology. I don't think that's really what it is. You may need other things, and there may be other things that are even better. For personality disorders, I'd probably say start with DBT and then add ACT ideas. ACT ideas are fine, but add ACT techniques to get some traction with what Marsha produced. The way we get around it is by idiographically applying process concepts that were developed originally idiographically and are now being tested, one important person, couple, or family at a time. That's a different agenda, and I would like it to be the agenda for all of the intervention sciences. Everything that your listeners want, behavioral science, since every single listener is a particular person, there's no average person listening. There's no average person existing. If you do the math on how many people are average, you know the answer with pilots, but it's a funny thing. Take ten or fifteen things you think are really important to humanity, and say, "Okay, where's the normal person on earth?" You get things like one person who lives in Sweden. It's ridiculous, so that's how we get around it.

SPENCER: Besides the difference in our approach to thinking about individuals and thinking about people's behavior over time, what would you say are other really big differences between ACT and CBT in terms of how you look at change?

STEVE: Traditional CBT had this idea that you had to detect, challenge, dispute, and change irrational cognitions, and that cognition would drive emotion, which together drive behavior. It turns out things like reappraisal don't work that way. Reappraisal works, but the way it works is by encouraging cognitive flexibility. In addition to this thought, you could have that which ones you want to put our behavior behind.

SPENCER: Instead of refuting a thought, let's say you have a thought, "I'm unlovable," and then you challenge that thought. You're saying that instead of changing your mind about that thought, you're opening yourself up to other ways of thinking. How would you explain that?

STEVE: You can put in the "What does the evidence show?" kind of stuff, as long as you don't expect the thought to go away. We're historical beings. Mary had a little lamb that would never go away, and that includes things that may be irrational. So it's sort of a brain injury. Don't be praying for that. I don't mind even challenging, as long as people know that that's only useful when it's helpful for people to think more broadly and then take what's useful and leave the rest. But leaving the rest doesn't mean they're not there as echoes. They'll be there the rest of your life. The metaphor I use is like you have salty water; pour in more fresh water. Don't be getting out tweezers to get rid of the salt crystals. It's a waste of time. There's too many of them. The number of thoughts in your head is infinite. Cleaning up your cognitive ecology is like trying to clean up a dirty basement that has an infinite number of dust bunnies. Learn to come into the moment and use your cognitive skills in a way that promotes you, and that includes new thoughts, absolutely. But here's the problem, Spencer, with challenging: if you have a thought that you really hate and want to get rid of, how do you know that you got rid of it?

SPENCER: I guess if you don't have that thought appear in your mind as often, you might think that you've somehow reduced it.

STEVE: Okay, great. How do you know the thought is appearing less often?

SPENCER: Yeah, well, it's tough, because I think people forget almost every thought they ever have. So it's hard to even be aware whether you're having it less often.

STEVE: There's that. Yeah, let's say you're a real obsessive CBT person, and there are such people, and you really want to be sure that you've done what that book says. How are you going to know that thought went away?

SPENCER: Have you tried to write it down when you notice it?

STEVE: You have to think about it again. You're into a bad Verizon commercial. Is it gone yet? Is it gone yet? Is it gone yet? Is what gone? I can't tell you why, because if I tell you, I'm thinking about it. Yes, so just cut it out. You're a historical being. You're not a blackboard with an eraser. Historical beings are a different kind of creature. You can clean up the dirt on your floor, cover over the paint on your walls, but you can't vacuum away your memories. It's kind of pathetic when people are always trotting out that you can get rid of your memories. Think of what a horror that would be if we actually could do that. That movie, I forget the name of it, where you sort of eliminate your memories and then you make all the same errors over and over again? No, I think the problem with traditional CBT, which, let me just say it harshly, is that traditional CBT is tested thoroughly. For example, what are the mediators? If you know how mediation works, what is the evidence that works as a mediator? The depressed adjective, checklist or whatever it is, never works as a mediator. It's not the functionally important pathway of change. Cognitive flexibility is what happens with cognitive reappraisal. So let's work on having lots of thoughts, holding them all lightly, and what ACT says to that is, learn to hold all of your thoughts lightly. It's not that hard. You can take thoughts that are dominating you, and you don't get rid of them, but you just put them to the side so you can see other things, but they're still there. When you do that, you're pouring in clear water, and you no longer have to think the bad thought to get rid of the bad thought that gives you the bad thought. Just the paradox of cognitive control.

SPENCER: Can you explain thought defusion?

STEVE: Yeah. Defusion is a made-up word. It's not D, i, f, f, but D, E, fusion. Fusion means to pour together. The Latin word means to pour, like lemonade. You taste lemonade, but you may miss its elements because it's all together. The initial name was deliteralization, but I couldn't say it fast, so defusion. What it means is to deliberately reduce the automatic behavior, regulatory and emotional regulatory impact of thoughts, while still allowing thoughts to occur at a given form frequency or situational sensitivity. When you do that, oddly enough, they tend not to occur as much because they're not relevant anymore. It's not that they're not there, and even if you forget them, you can relearn them more quickly, showing that they're still in the mind. It's that sort of brain injury. I'll give you an example of some diffusion skills. Take a thought that you really don't like and say it very slowly. Sing it. Say it in the voice of your least favorite politician. Distill it down to a single word, say it over and over again for 30 seconds, at least once per second. Or here's one, just to show that we're not making fun of the mind. Remember how young you were when you first had a thought, kind of like that. Picture yourself at that age, as if you could be interacting with yourself and have that little you say the thought in their little voice, the thoughts that you say so easily to yourself about brushing your teeth in the morning, those self-critical, harsh thoughts, and you're going to, A, probably want to cry, and B, want to hug the kid. Treat yourself the same way. Now, when did you get so big that you weren't worth your own compassion? Then you have thoughts without them having you. Meditation can help because of attentional control, especially just not attending to the difficult thoughts. Reappraisal can work if what you mean is, what else could you think about that same situation? What else could you think? What else could you think? Even rational stuff, I'm okay with that, if you don't get stuck on the agenda that if I think clearly, the bad will go away. No, it won't. Not the historical part.

SPENCER: It seems to be such a big shift to identify thoughts as just a sensory experience rather than this is me.

STEVE: Exactly, but there's a piece where it's so fusion, that's why these all go together. I gave you six things to track, plus extending it to your body and relationships. You mentioned in that one, this is me. We tend to have this sense of self. There's a deep sense of self that connects you in consciousness to others. That is there when you're having out-of-body experiences or psychedelic experiences that really move you, or spiritual experiences of any kind, which turns out to be very common. It's not unlike what Maslow thought. If you ask the question. The high 90s percent of people have had experiences of oneness, oceanic awareness, and connection across time, place, and person. This is a space that we know how to embody, and in some deep and important way, you are all of that, and you're distinct from that. You're more like a bowl that's holding your history, and so it contains all of that, but it's also distinct from that. If that's who you are in a really deep sense, like I'm a bowl, a soul of consciousness and the location of energy in my body and acculturation that's carrying forward things that have happened long ago, physiologically, culturally in my human history. When you allow thoughts like, "I'm a bad person," to try to characterize that, you're taking this more ineffable, huge thing called you and your own consciousness and distilling it down to this small, tiny set of examples and trying to put a pin through it and say that's who I am. It's not who you are. It's just your judgmental mind judging you and describing you, but in such a way that it's a cartoon. It's like trying to turn a song into a single note and saying that's a song. It's not true. Take any self-judgment. I did it with you early when I said, all the time everywhere, "I'm honest and kind," all the time everywhere, with everyone, liar. You have to lie about who you are in order to characterize who you are. How about if we do something a little wiser? It's in our wisdom traditions. It's in our contemplative traditions. It's there in modern stuff, a psychedelic assistant finding a part of us that's beyond categorization and allowing you to grow into being a whole you, as opposed to the cartoon that your categorical, judgmental mind will make of you. Even the stories we tell. There's an ACT exercise. Can I suggest it to people to try?

SPENCER: Of course.

STEVE: It's in the first ACT book. Write down a paragraph about your life and why you are how you are, just a paragraph. Circle every fact, underline every emotion, thought, reaction, etc. Take everything that's circled or underlined and write a new paragraph that's fundamentally different. Everything's in there.

SPENCER: So just keeping the facts by replacing everything else.

STEVE: Yeah, keeping facts and your actual experience, what you felt, what you saw, okay, rewrite the story now. Do it again. What is the point? It's not that there's the right story. It's your story all the time, all right. You think your life is determined by the story you tell. You just wrote three different stories. If you really believe that, how about you pick one that you like? Just at least do that. But here's an even better idea. Notice that your story is changing, and now come back to this moment. What do I want to do with my agency, my life, my ability, my responsibility? It used to be written as two words, my response ability, ability to respond, but you're a prisoner. You're chained down. You have to do the next thing that you usually do, really sure by habits, but you can change. Write down all the things you've done that you've changed over your life, and you'll see you've changed massively. Okay, what are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do today? And be careful of the stories being the ones that dictate to you, so the dictator within will tell you a story, but most people don't like being pushed around by a dictator. If you want to rebel, rebel against that. And then let's get on with the business of learning how to be a better me. And that's the values piece. What are the qualities you want to put? Could I say this to you, Spencer, you named something. You didn't name them. You didn't give a name, but you had somebody in mind. Could I ask you this question, this person you picked, do they reflect values you would like to have in your behavior, how they were with you, or who they were as a person, when you looked up to them in some way? You picked them. Does it inform the journey you would like to be on in your life? Would you like to internalize some of what you saw in them, in you?

SPENCER: Yeah, some of their qualities, yeah.

STEVE: Okay, how about if we do that tomorrow? Or even better, today.

STEVE: And I bet you, Spencer, you can think of something you could do before the end of the day today that would reflect who they were, whether they're dead or alive, that you could put into your own actual behavior as a quality intrinsic to what you're doing. That's what ACT is trying to do. My point of going back to you already knows it is that everybody here knows that being open, aware, and engaged is what they want to do, but they've got a storytelling, judgmental organ that's great for doing math problems and sometimes really bad for living a life.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, because we're about out of time, what should people keep in mind if they want to make positive change?

STEVE: If I had to pick the most powerful place to start, it would be where we ended our conversation, which is, what are the qualities of being and doing I really would like to bring into the world and make more common, just by the fact that I'm doing it, where it's intrinsic, not because it leads to something else, and then I'll get more fame or money or whatever. Another question will be, what will you do with your fame, and what will you do with your money? It's fine to have fame and money or any of those things, but it doesn't delay the question. The question lands: what do you want to put into the world? If what you're putting into the world is intrinsic to what you do and how you are with yourself and others.

SPENCER: Not a destination, not a goal?

STEVE: A destination only in the sense that it informs the journey. If you have a lighthouse in the distance and you walk towards it, at the moment that you orient towards it, you're headed towards it, and every step you're headed towards it. What if it's something like that, where you're never going to get to the lighthouse? That doesn't mean that you're not headed that way. That's the intrinsic part. Values are like that. You never get them and say, "Now I got them. I'm a loving person. Oh, time to hurt people." No, it's never finished. It's one of those levels. It's like a mirage in the desert. It keeps moving away as you move towards it, because your capacity for being loving, let's say, if it's still growing, you never get there. You just go there. Well, values are like that, and so the valuing is a quality of each step. If there's something to take away, it might be, could you come, go out and read the books and stuff. You can get stuff for free. You can go to the World Health Organization and get a really great book on an ACT called Doing What Matters in Times of Stress. It's free on their website, so it's out there. You don't have to pay any money and start really thinking seriously about how you're spending your life moments.

STEVE: That little thing I asked you to do, where do you want to go? What is that little network then measured? We have tech now to do that, but you could do it easily with just paper and pencil. Hold yourself accountable for being headed in that way. But out of this finger wagging, "Oh, I didn't do my 10,000 steps. I will never get there, not like that." Something more like, "I want that." Things come up and wander. You find the lighthouse, and you step towards it. If there's a big barrier, you find a way around it. You don't have to think, because you slip, because you fall, you can't head in that direction. So, yeah, the takeaway might be, it's your utility thing. Spencer, you raised when you said, yeah, but these concepts are so useful in predicting, I'd say, "Here are some concepts that have been proven in the entire world's literature to be part of a pathway of change for all intervention methods that are psychosocial and have been looked at." I can actually send you the document or the study. It's open access that people can read if they want. But you know it already. You knew it by the heroes you picked, for example. All right, time's up. But today, and then now we're tomorrow, if we're going to create a more values-based on loving, rational, and clear thinking, yeah, clearly focused on the kind of thinking that takes you in the direction you want to head in. That's a kind of clearer thinking.

SPENCER: Fantastic. Steve, thank you so much. Really great to chat with you.

STEVE: Thank you for the opportunity.