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 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

But the hilarious thing is that the evidence says that you don't need to do that.

You just have to start doing stuff.

One of the most effective treatments for depression is what's known as behavioral activation.

And the idea of that is depressed people stop doing things that they find valuable and meaningful and pleasurable.

And it creates this feedback loop where you feel down, so you don't feel like going out.

So you skip seeing your friends.

And then that means you're at home all day lying around.

And then that makes you feel even worse.

And that makes you even more likely to kind of disengage from the world.

And so in behavioral activation, they'll literally have people write down, like, what are the things that you enjoy typically?

Even if you predict you're not going to enjoy them, because depressed people often do predict that they're not going to get much out of these activities, and they just have them do them as experiments.

Okay, why don't you rate how much you think you're going to enjoy it, and then you're going to go do it, and then you're going to rate after how much you enjoyed it.

And usually they enjoy it more than they predicted.

And it tends to break them out of the spiral.

So even if they have these existential angst around nothing mattering, oddly, getting really pragmatic and just working on the behavior can often make people feel a lot better.

And that tracks with, hey, find a problem and go work on it.

You know, even if you have this existential angst.

If you're certain that we're doomed, then I would say you're overconfident.

And if you're not certain that we're doomed, then there's hope.

Then there's something to focus on.

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