Spencer Greenberg
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's just not like, you know, you will literally, you know, three or four days later, at some point you'll be eating breakfast and not thinking about the fact that your loved one died.
And then later you're going to be swept up in emotion, maybe in the afternoon of like deep, intense sadness.
And emotions work this way, I think, for really good reason, because it's absolutely not functional to feel the emotion all the time at that level.
In fact, it's deeply dysfunctional in the sense that it prevents us from doing useful things.
If you just always felt equally sad after a loved one dies, you would be completely dysfunctional.
But it comes in waves, and that is functional.
And so one way, for example, that fear can go wrong is if we feel fear all the time, that's actually not the way the emotion works functionally.
We should feel, you know, I sometimes think about like, you know, people today think they're in this unprecedented era of like uncertainty, you know, like a lot of people worry about climate change, like destroying the world and like, oh, we're dealing with this like impossible thing or a lot of effective altruists are like, oh, we're dealing with this impossible thing around AI.
And yeah, that's really difficult.
But I also think back and I think, you know what?
My grandfather, he thought Nazis were going to take over the entire world.
Like, you know, and he had, like, pretty good reason to fear that, and he went and fought against them, right?
And then you think back, you know what?
In the early 60s, people thought the world was going to be destroyed by nuclear weapons, and they had pretty good reason to actually think that, and they were deeply afraid of that.
And then I think back even further to, you know, our ancient ancestors, like, 20,000 years ago, and imagine there was some
tribe nearby that had destroyed other tribes and was much more powerful and one day could just show up and kill you and everyone you love and everyone you've ever cared about and your entire world would cease to exist.
My point here is not to undermine these feelings, but just to say this is not a unique thing.
Humans in history have dealt with this.
You know, there's something human about this.
And they found different ways to deal with it.
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