Spencer Greenberg

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1,056 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Spencer Greenberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #249 – Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

This brings up another idea, actually, that another fascinating guest on my podcast, Clear Thinking, talked about.

His name is David Burns, and he was one of the psychologists that really popularized the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy, and his book sold millions of copies about this.

This thought experiment he has that I think is really valuable, which is the magic dial.

Imagine you had a magic dial and you could control how much of different emotions you would feel.

Like, okay, let's take your fear, right?

Where would you dial that dial?

Would you just leave it?

You're like, no, I actually feel the optimal amount of fear.

Would you dial it down to zero?

And I think part of his insight and why he kind of developed this idea is he realized working with patients over decades that actually sometimes they feel like therapists are trying to push them down to zero.

Not that that's achievable, but they might feel that.

And they might actually have resistance to that because they might feel like, well, zero is not the right level, right?

And so then he asked, well, what is the right level?

So I'd ask that of you.

Would you actually leave the dial exactly where it is?

Another thing I think that's useful to understand there is that the way emotions work is you don't feel them consistently all the time.

So suppose a loved one dies, like someone you really deeply love and are connected to.

Like there's this naive model of emotions sometimes people have.

which is like, oh, you're just going to feel like equally, you know, sad or depressed for like weeks or months.

But if you've had this happen to you, you know, that is not the way emotions work.

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